And now I have a power tool that shoots muddy water at me. Finally.

bkd

Nine switches down, four to go — upstairs. Then I can hit the basement! Good times, good times.

bkd

Not pictured that should’ve been:

• Dremeling the underlayment to fit.
• Applying the latex underlayment putty to a couple uneven spots.

It was just the area where the old cabinets used to be and the floor exposed by taking out the wall that needed new sub-floor and underlayment. Took a few tries to figure out what thickness both of those needed to be (19/32 for the subfloor, 5 mm for the underlayment). Learned that all wood screws aren’t the same and that just because two boxes of nails have the exact same description on them, that doesn’t mean they’re the same quality of nail.

And if anyone in the Pgh area needs help installing a new plywood sub-floor, I’d be happy to help.

bkd

Other direction.

Done:

• Floor stripped, sanded, and re-finished.
• Closet hardware removed.
• Closet wall and ceiling replaced.
• Ceiling primed and painted.
• Walls primed and painted (“Barraud House Blue” and “Tyler Stone Medium”).
• Trim primed and painted.
• Baseboards cut to fit modern registers.
• New registers installed.
• New light fixture installed.
• New three-prong outlets installed (x3).
• New light switch.
• New closet organizer installed.

That’s really not much of a list. It really shouldn’t have taken so long.

Still to Come:

• Window coverings (x2).
• Ceiling vent replacement.
• Door painted and replaced.

Really looking forward to it.

bkd

The sound in the background is the fan in the living room. It’s 95 degrees outside and I don’t have air conditioning is why. Some of the tiles came off more easily than this one and some were more difficult. I finished about half the floor, but wanted to leave a race track around the edges so I can paint without having to walk on glue residue. The word “residue” seems underutilized.

bkd

I’m probably going with these instead. Yep.

Yeah, so I posted a question on ikeafans.com and a couple people responded with completed designs. Pretty cool.

bkd

My greatest victory of the project so far: fixing the one bum circuit in the upstairs. I’ve had only occasional electrical in my living room and two big bedrooms. For some reason it took me a month to figure out that the problem might be caused by one bad connection at the start of the circuit. Then it took me two more weeks to figure out that the outlet in the corner of the living room — you know, directly above the breaker box in the garage, might be the first outlet on the circuit. Then I replaced it and everything worked and, yeah.

Here’s what the inside of that outlet box looked like:

You can sort of see that the shielding has worn away on those wires there. I guess that’s bad. Trimmed them down, taped them up, stuck them back in the box. Brilliance on my part. Also, turned out that these old outlets are grounded after all (even though they’re two-prong outlets), which is sort of super.

I’ve also started (very gradually) swapping out the other outlets and light switches.

The old push-button switches look all cool and stuff, but in reality they just sort of don’t work well and I’m replacing them. But cool-looking.

bkd

In the beginning was the bathroom.

And then we pulled the vanity out of it. Yes, the tile is pink and the walls and ceiling are brown.

Was pink.

Happiness is a cold chisel.

Then (after cutting them out with a drywall knife and hitting them with a hammer repeated) the walls came tumbling down.

Stoked to discover 52-year-old razor blades inside the wall. Made of tungsten!

And now, instead of a hideous pink, green, and brown bathroom, I have a rubble-covered, wall-less, function-less room. ¡Viva el progreso!

For some reason also I thought I’d enjoy this renovation stuff during-the-fact. It’ll be a good thing to have done, but in the meantime I’m sick of having to live in the basement and dump my bank account into Home Depot’s.

Out,

bkd

Also took the “bulkhead” out of the kitchen (just a drywall box coming down from the ceiling and hanging down to meet the tops of the wall cabinets). That change is less dramatic, although imho it makes the room look bigger.

Used to be just a three-foot opening; now it’s maybe seven-and-a-half.

View of coat closet. Obviously.

Missing: bulkhead.

There had been much speculation in certain circles about what would happen with the beam going across the to-be-removed wall. See!

It’s just two 2×12s screwed together. Had to get into the hallway wall a little bit. And on the side of the opening not pictured are two 2×4s holding up the new beam.

And aside from writing the check, I’ve had nothing to do with this part of the project.

bkd

]]> http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/2010/06/meanwhile-back-in-the-kitchen/feed/ 2 http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/2010/06/red-roof-on/?&owa_from=feed&owa_sid= http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/2010/06/red-roof-on/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:22:16 +0000 bkdunn http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/?p=1197 Cost me $4,500 or something crazy, you’d think I’d be willing to take a real photograph of it. It’s probably raining outside though. Or it’s hot. Either way. The new roof is sort of a reddish brown.

You can’t really see the color in the photo. Cell phone pic.

It’s been weird having people come work at the house. They come really early, usually wake me up when they get here (6:30? C’mon!). Then they bang on things until they get tired and then they leave. And I sort of don’t want to do anything while they’re here, mostly because I’m pretty sure they’ll tell me that I’m doing it wrong.

New roof! Now my closets might not leak.

bkd

• Delivered my car to me from San Diego.
• Got my washing machine drainage pipe to stop leaking.
• Took out the laundry sink (that had rusted through).
• Capped the water inlets for the laundry sink.
• Pulled out the sink cabinet from the kitchen.
• Took out the now-useless plumbing from the kitchen.
• Encouraged me to buy a sawzall.
• Bought me a hedge trimmer.
• Cut the four-feet-tall weeds in the front yard down to the ground.
• Discovered a dozen eggs in the side yard (?).
• Stripped the little bedroom of its leather-like paint.
• Got two of the four basement fluorescent light fixtures to function regularly.
• Pulled the vanity out of the bathroom.
• Removed the worn-out bathroom sink drainage pipes.
• Found a nearby Mexican restaurant that’s surprisingly good.

It’s a good tally for three days. Didn’t realize my dad knew so much about plumbing. Feel kind of bad there was none of the fun stuff ready for them to do — I guess the kitchen would be the only real fun stuff (tiling, hanging cabinets, installing counter tops). Maybe next trip.

The family that strips together…

Sawzall conquers all — or at least can saw a sink cabinet in half. Wonder if it can cut through a zombie spine.

No gushing water. Any more.

Yep,

bkd

Weight: 0.

Weight: equivalent to three rolls of 1 1/2-inch masking tape, three spiders, and a gnat carcass.

I kind of like sticking random bug bodies into tape balls. Or at least, I prefer it to having the random bug bodies hanging out in the corners of my rooms.

Yeah, well. Living room before:

After (Market Tavern Green Medium and Eloquent Ivory):

Fake fireplace is gone. The wall with the pass-through is going to be half-gone pretty soon. Box of Triscuits also gone. Also painted one of the bedrooms. Check this out!

It’s a bedroom.

And now I only have, like, everything left to do. Maybe I’ll post the story about how I managed to get vents on the walls! They should make a video game out of this house renovation. There can be mini game after mini game, each more repetitive than the last. There could also be annoying NPCs. And when you accidentally kill your horse, you can just whistle and another horse will come for you. Just like real life.

bkd

PS, Market Tavern Green Light. The bedroom. It’s lighter than the living room in real life.

Before I moved out here, I was thinking I’d go with “colonial” colors, shades that I thought George Eastman could live with. To that end, I found a set of “Colonial Williamsburg” colors here, that I thought would cover it. Once I got out here, though, I looked through my photo catalog and saw the color I had in my NYC apartment and thought that, man, yeah, I dug that color, I should just do that. So I went Behr’s website to try and find it, but couldn’t. So then I got kind of mad at myself for waffling and thought, y’know, screw it, I’m just gonna be decisive, so I went down to Lowe’s and came up with a shade of green that looked good on the card and had them mix up a gallon of that green as well as the lighter version of it, since it’s a small house and I didn’t want to go too dark. Got home, broke open the lighter green (it was called “Milkweed”) and painted The Good Bedroom:

A lot of milk, not much weed. Seemed darker on the card. Waited overnight to pass judgment on it, since, sure, it could dry darker. In the morning, went in and, after spraining a cornea trying to differentiate the Milkweed walls from the Ultrapure White ceiling, decided that the walls mostly looked like I’d tried to paint white on top of blue-green and done a really shoddy job of it. At which point I gave up on the Lowe’s colors. Lowes. Whatever.

That decided, I went back to thinking I could re-do the New York apartment. When I’d been unable to find the NYC green on the Behr site (it was called “Lilypad”, may it rest in peace), I’d gone to the Home Depot site and ordered up samples of a bunch of greens that might fit the bill. Those had arrived, and so I painted sample splotches on the kitchen wall that’s gonna get demoed. The colors ranged from circus-like to insulting. Except for one. It was called “Fairway Mist”. Waited overnight for the splotches to dry (yeah, photo would have helped the story, fat lot of good it does for you to say so now), then discovered that Fairway Mist was close, but probably a little too bright. So that evening I went to Home Depot and bought three more buckets: a slightly toned-down version of Fairway Mist (“Peridot”), that color’s lighter cousin (“Spring Morn”), and a color I’d had on the wall in NYC that offers pretty good contrast for images projected on it via my LCD projector (“Silver Screen”).

That night I dreamed that I was on Survivor and was the first person voted out of the game. That ego-crushing nightmare brought me to the realization that George Eastman would laugh me out of Rochester if I showed him the colors I was going to use (if only he weren’t dead), which caused me to revert back to Plan A. Drove out to the Special Person store in Castle Shannon (it’s a suburb), which carries the kind of paint that comes in “Colonial Williamsburg” colors. The store is a “Special Person store” in the sense that I think you gotta be pretty special to afford the stuff they have there. $15/sf for slate tile? I’m not that special.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought the PDF of the brochure (it had been black-and-white anyway), but the helpful helper person at the store went online and printed it off. In real life the colors that looked pretty good on screen looked like crazy Home Depot samples on the color chits. Therefore I enlisted the help of the store person (must be hard to be a woman and have everyone assume you know how to match colors all the time). Through serious and sometimes contentious negotiation with her, however, a coherent color palette emerged, consisting of medium (muted) green, lighter (muted) green, medium (muted) blue, and a pleasant bisque color for the narrow hallway. After waiting two hours for them to mix the colors (?!), I rushed home in a developing rainstorm to finally, finally get some real painting done. Got home, opened up the bisque, and started painting.

Eastman would probably refuse to let me even buy film from him if he ever saw *this*.

I suppose it should have been a red flag that the color was called “Palace Chambers Yellow Light” — but it didn’t look that yellow on the card. I mean, yellow-*ish*, sure, but it had looked more like the color of a sunlit rope, not, you know, this. Man. Anyway. Even before it dried I was pretty sure I was going to be re-painting the hallway also.

That’s about it for the misfortune. I was kind of hoping I’d have built some tension into the story by this point. I should have established some stakes earlier on so that you’d be desperate to read the outcome. OTOH, that’s a little cliche. Tension? Yeah, it’s been done. I don’t need to roll that way.

bkd

I’d never done ceilings before. It turns out a lot of paint falls onto your face, some gets in your eyes, and especially when you’re trying to do it in low light, it’s pretty hard to see what areas you’ve coated twice and which you haven’t. (Having now lived with the ceilings a few days, however, it worked out fine.) I used a pole

This is what the living room ceiling looked like when I moved in:

Look at the ceiling. It’s the same color as the walls: olive drab (or thereabouts). My agent said that the unfortunate part of painting the ceiling the same color as the walls is that it makes the person inside feel like he’s wrapped up in a ball. That said, looking back at this photo, the house didn’t look all that bad and I’m confused as to why I’ve torn it up and made it as unlivable as I have.

Not really, I remember why. It’s been interesting to observe as work has progressed and the “worst smelling room in the house” title has gone to progressively better-smelling rooms. Currently the stairway is winning (losing?). It smells like dog sweat. And living inside a ball is aesthetically odd. And the photo doesn’t show the five decades of grime on the trim. Or show the odd stains on the walls. Or imply how sticky those surfaces are.

Then here it is after having been painted with Behr Ceiling Paint (very flat, very white):

Hooray: I have a normal-person ceiling now!

The light spot is from light coming through the window.

Great, then. I’ve got painted ceilings in the living room, hallway, and “the good bedroom”. I mean, in real-time I have more than that, but I’ll get to that, I guess. I mean, unless you’re watching fishing on TV, I have to imagine you’re following my painting exploits. Ceilings -> Walls -> Trim.

And remember that it is forever.

bkd

Kilz is the brand name of the primer. It seals in stains and odors and whatever else is stuck to the wall, including (I hope) spiders. The wall really soaks the stuff up. Interesting?

The roller is coming. Beware the roller.

The two-sided roller holder, btw, was kind of a dumb idea. I bought a normal one later. The fake fireplace has gone the way of all the earth: whited out by primer. Before/after:

The step ladder did not move. It is an optical illusion.

If you try hard enough, you can still see the fake fireplace. For now. And I’d have uploaded a better “before” photo, but that would’ve been on my other computer, which is on the bed. Clearly, then, a better “before” photo is (and will remain) out of the question.

Up next, the excitement level skyrockets as I start painting the ceiling. Pregnant women and readers with heart conditions are advised to avoid my blog for the remainder of the week.

bkd

Because the cat urine stench alone wasn’t enough to peel paint off the walls.

Filling holes.

It’s a metal thing nailed into the drywall that kept the tiles in.

Hadn’t realized my baseboards were this ugly.

The dropping of cloth is complete.

Lacks drama. Not edgy enough. It’s 7:12 in the morning right now. There was some other stuff not pictured. Like that one glass brick window had a couple of wood things screwed into the window box that didn’t want to come out because the screws’ heads were stripped. Had to pull them off their screws and then unscrew them with pliers. Now *that* was drama.

Not really. It was pretty normal. I’m just glad I didn’t put another gash in the drywall.

Speaking of gashes, there was a pretty good-sized hole in the wall above the fake fireplace. I tried putting one of those pre-fabricated patches on it, but the metal thing on the patch was really thick and made the patch too obvious. So I pulled it off and just put drywall tape over the hole and mudded over that drywall tape. I’m guessing it’s less likely to stand the test of time this way, but it definitely looks better. Worst case, I have to re-patch it and re-paint it some time in the future, but so long as that future date is after Labor Day, that’ll be fine. Right now I just want to get stuff done and move on and in the meantime hopefully none of my house guests decide to probe the living room walls for soft spots.

The paint in the one bedroom and in the hallway came off in sheets as pictured. Kind of disturbing. And once that paint was off, the wall behind it smelled like cigarette smoke.

Drop cloths worked better than hoped. It turns out that the two big drop cloths I got each had one of their two dimensions perfectly in sync with one of the two dimensions of one of the two rooms they were used in. So it was a pretty good fit. FWIW, I’m only working on the living room, hallway, and one of the bedrooms right now.

I need to get some window coverings so I don’t have to wake up at sunrise every morning.

Otherwise fine,

bkd

PS, WIll eventually do a floor re-finishing post-mortem, but all the “before” photos are on the laptop and the laptop is in a place called “Cranberry Township” right now. It sounds like a place where the street signs are slathered in gumdrops, but it’s not. It’s just a place. Might be a few days still for the post-mortem though.

Here’s another thought on the kitchen. It’s sort of like the last one, only this time I’ve moved the fridge to the “east” wall as per Krik. Although I’ve sort of lost the pantry in the process (I’m okay with that) and I didn’t move the stove as much further south as recommended (because where it’s positioned here is where the existing external vent and 220-volt outlet are), although I moved it far enough to accommodate an 18-inch base cabinet, which I think was the main concern anyway.

Each square = 6 inches!

I priced the cabinets+doors out at $1,957 at Ikea. I priced out all the hardware and kickplates also, but the total sum is on my laptop, which is north of here. Getting fixed.

Still haven’t had anyone come out to estimate taking out the southeast wall as pictured above. Tomorrow? We’ll see, son. We’ll see.

bkd

First coat.

The finished wood doesn’t actually look as dark as this.

Now I just gotta wait another 72 hours for it to cure. Depending on the lighting, I either really like the natural wood (no stain) look or have continued misgivings about it. Natural light: looks great. Artificial: misgivings. It’s unfair to judge until it’s all settled and done with anyway.

I’ll do some sort of floor refinishing post-mortem some time after the 72 hours are up. While I’m waiting for it to dry, I’ll probably go back into the kitchen for a day or two and see if I can get rid of the rest of the tiles and pull the sink cabinet out (the tricky part is that the pipes have grown up through the bottom of it), then it’ll be back to the living room and bedrooms. On deck there:

• Paint prep (patching, spackling, sanding, removing plates and vents, removing light fixtures, taping, laying ground cover).
• One coat of Kilz on every surface I can find that isn’t a floor or window.
• Paint ceiling (flat white).
• Paint walls (hoping to find the same green I had in NYC).
• Paint trim (white).

That should take care of next week.

bkd

The cool thing is that if I reversed the order of the photos, it’d still look like I’d done something.

Yeah, all I did was knock the “mantle” part off of it. But still. Took at *least* 20 minutes. Prior to destruction, I showed this feature to a guest.

Her: They just painted the wall like a fireplace.

Me: Yeah.

Her: But it’s just a cold air return.

Me: Yeah.

Her: So what were they…?

Me: Yeah.

Her: Oh.

Me: Yeah.

In a few days, Kilz ftw.

Other than that, yesterday was another day of sanding and shop-vac’ing. You can’t tell me this doesn’t look like fun:

Unless you want to, then you can.

Here’s a run-down of sanding:

Drum Sander: 2.5 days.

Edge Sander: 1.5 days.

Orbital + Finish Sander: 2 half-days.

Clean-up with Orbital Sander: 2 hours this morning.

Doesn’t actually look that arduous when it’s typed out like that. OTOH, I blew my nose yesterday afternoon and whatever it was that came out was medium-brown.

bkd

Spellbinding.

I’m also pursuing the sisyphusian, er, pursuit of filling all the edges of the floor (the part that runs up against the baseboards) so that I can leave the toe plate off. Unfortunately, this floor was laid down with the then-firm knowledge that there’d be another round of molding added to the system, so they just left gaps (you can see one in the photo above). We’ll see how it works out. They should sell wood putty in bigger tubs — I’ve been through two already and will probably need at least a couple more tomorrow.

And then, since it seems like I’m probably going to leave the floor natural (and not stain it), I’m trying to get rid of the last holdout of a urine stain in the house. I guess hydrogen peroxide is supposed to be good for that, but that it can take many days. Hrm.

Today is day two.

Fortunately, the peroxide in this bottle is topical.

I want to get these floors done. I’m tired of living in the basement like a common troll. I might pronounce this stain “light enough” pretty soon. It’s getting a little lighter. It’s about 3″ x 3″ and it’s behind the door in the big bedroom, so it’s not something that you’d likely see very often. Yeah, I dunno. We’ll see how it goes.

As for the closet — all the bedroom closets are standard 1958 in arrangement. They have a shelf with a hanger rod underneath. They’re all in decent shape, but I need more clothes storage space, so I gotta do something better in the big bedroom closet. Here are before and after the removal of hardware:

The main difference is the addition of the stepladder.

It was in there pretty good and 52-year-old nails don’t necessarily like getting pulled. You can also see “Brian’s Bane” in there — that gray stuff coming down from the ceiling on the back wall of the closet. Pretty sure that’s from water damage from some time in the (distant?) past (the plaster has peeled off the old-school “drywall”). The back wall I can just mud over, but the ceiling is pretty screwed up all the way through to the insulation. I’m thinking I might have a guy put (modern) drywall up there or something.

Bought one of those Rubbermaid closet organizers off of Amazon for it. I bought the deluxe organizer instead of the standard one. Couldn’t for the life of me tell what the difference was, aside from the deluxe one being $10 cheaper for some reason. But if I have to wait for a new ceiling, it’ll probably be a while before it gets installed (and I’ll probably move upstairs into the #2 bedroom instead of the “big” one).

I should probably get myself to back off a little, but I’m really stoked on this idea of moving upstairs soon. I’m sort of hoping over the upcoming weekend. That’s probably aggressive, but all I have to do is: plug more holes in the floor tomorrow (where the shoe molding used to go), sand the corners and the putty fill, three coats of urethane, paint the baseboards, paint the ceilings, and paint the walls.

Yeah. Maybe the following weekend.

bkd