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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

For some reason I knocked all the tiles off before I demolished the walls. It was sort of fun chiseling them off, but just unnecessary. I suppose I did it that way because all the write-ups I found online talked about knocking tiles off so that they could be reused. In my case, no, I will not be reusing my tile. Because it sucks.

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

The kitchen has been opened up. The new gaping hole isn’t finished off at all yet, but still: the kitchen has been opened up. Makes a much bigger difference than the photos can convey — a lot more light gets in there and the kitchen now feels like it’s sort of part of the same space as the living room. At least the one part of the kitchen does. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like when the kitchen is in use — the work areas of the kitchen will still be behind the wall and cut off. Should probably put a big mirror up against the one wall so I can see what the servants are doing in there while I’m in here playing Fallout: New Vegas.

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 2x12s screwed together. Had to get into the hallway wall a little bit. And on the side of the opening not pictured are two 2x4s holding up the new beam.

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

bkd

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

My parents came out to visit last week. Was good to have some company, especially company that wanted to spend their time in Pittsburgh working on my house. Here’s a list of some of their accomplishments:

• 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

Posting about Half Dome and Boundary Waters was a lot more engaging. Try it yourself, prove me wrong. (Or right.) Tape ball, before and after:

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.

More like “bad decisions” than “misfortune”. Or maybe more like “difficult, non-binding decisions that could not be made without investment of time and money”. Something like that. It’s taken too long to paint the three rooms I’m painting and part of the deal has been color decisions.

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

The best days are the ones when I (a) don’t go to Home Depot and (b) don’t need anything from Home Depot that I’m just kidding myself into trying to do without because I’m tired of going to Home Depot. FWIW:

• About the third day after I moved into the house, I started getting this rash on my left arm. It covered most of my forearm and then spread to my right arm and lower abdomen. It’s just now going away. I’m thinking it’s an allergy to dust, 52-year-old varnish, crystalized cat urine, polyurethane, latex, humidity, Pittsburgh, or a combination of the above. I’m hoping it’s not Pittsburgh, that would be awkward.
• There was one afternoon last week where Home Depot was hounding me about returning the drum sander — that I’d returned a week earlier. They warned me that it was accumulating charges by being checked out so long etc., etc. It turns out that they couldn’t find it because they’d checked it out to another customer.
• Closest Home Depot with tool rentals is out in Monroeville — about 25 minutes, depending on the tunnel.
• Had to go pick up my repaired laptop one afternoon last week in Cranberry — about 45 minutes. It was covered under the nVidia recall. The repair, I mean.
• Went to campus to meet with my faculty advisor last Monday and to discuss a Scholarly Article that I’d read and written a couple of pages about. Took about a half a day.
• Guy from Verizon came on Friday to hook up my FiOS, which took four entire hours during which I did nothing productive.
• Week and a half ago I went go kart racing out in Beaver Falls. They kept giving us more and more practice laps, qualifying laps, heats, and final races, which was good from a value perspective. Came home with badly bruised ribs that make it hard to reach up (with, for instance, a paint roller) or sleep on my left side.
• Couple nights ago at about three in the morning I was woken up by sirens. They were apparently next door. Kept seeing a red light oscillating through my window. I’m guessing ambulance.
• One of my neighbors came over to tell me that if I park my truck too close to the stop sign, another neighbor will call the police.
• Tried to go to a church function last Monday, but after driving around the park twice, gave up. The second time through I saw a sign that said to turn right, but when I turned right, there were no church people. The park was about 20 minutes away from here.
• Driving back from the paint store, didn’t realize I needed to be in the left lane until it was too late, so instead I ended up turning right and acting like I’d meant to go to Walgreens all along. Getting out of Walgreens parking lot there was no left turn allowed, so I had to drive up the road, turn onto another road, then flip a U-ey using someone’s driveway, which I’m sure is way better than letting someone make a U-turn out of Walgreens’ parking lot.
• Drove the guy who chaperoned me during my Pitt fly-out and his wife to the airport. She forgot to pack her contact lenses, so I broke into their apartment, found them, and FedEx-ed them to her the next day.
• Getting my roof replacement and kitchen wall tear-down estimated required six phone calls, four in-person visits, seven text messages, and two emails. Work on the roof started today.

bkd

Painting has taken a long time. It will continue to take a long time.

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

I’m becoming increasingly incredulous that anything I have posted or will post regarding the renovations of my house has been, will be, or will have been interesting. With that in mind, I applied primer to my walls and ceiling prior to painting. That’s right: primer.

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