A Little Suspense

A warning up front: though the room is painted, messy floors and cloudy days have prevented me from taking a final picture. So what you get are the pictures leading up to, but not including, our painted master bedroom. Stay tuned for the finished product.

Here is the "before" picture, prepped and ready to go. As usual, we washed the walls with a phosphate-free TSP cleaner (an odd name, given that TSP stands for tri-sodium phosphate) and protected the floors.

Note the--as D called him--"beached whale" of a cat enjoying the paper and drop clothes on the floor.

Another "before" picture, this time of the alcove, featuring beached whale and his brother.

Next came the priming:

Then one of my favorite parts, picking the paint color:

Don't adjust your monitor--these colors are remarkably similar. I couldn't really even see the difference between the two swatches on the bottom.

Up for consideration were three from Sherwin Williams. From top to bottom are Clary Sage, Coastal Plain, and Willow Tree. I won't tell you which one we picked, so the next post will be a surprise. Not that it matters.

That's all for now. Oh, and Home Depot had a huge sale on mulch:

The Hallway!

It's about time to post pictures of our finished hallway. Today we finally touched up a few spots and screwed on an air conditioner intake vent but other than that, it's been done for a while.

You may remember that it started out entirely yellow, with cheapo light fixtures and separating drywall. Here's a picture of the corner between the bathroom and master bedroom. You can see the dark lines where the walls are separating.

So we spent one whole evening plastering up the drywall where we could reach it and another evening sanding and wiping the dust. We learned that you are supposed to prime over plaster to make the surface look the same as the wall, so even though we didn't prime everywhere, we did put it on over the edges we fixed. Here's the wall going down the stairs. You can (sort of) see the white along the edges.

We removed the fixtures to be able to paint the edges. We were planning to replace this directional light that shines down the stairs, but it looked complicated and is not in a standard electrical box, so we put it back when we finished. We did replace the little gold bubble light behind it though.

Because we were painting edges high up on the stairwell ceiling that we couldn't reach, we bought a wide variety of tools from Home Depot. We learned, after searching a few stores, that corner edging rollers are made from super cheap foam and padding and that high quality ones simply are not available. Surprisingly though, they did a better job than we expected.

 

You can see the gray we painted on the lower half of the hallway, as well as the Ikea coat hangers I mentioned here and the matching brushed nickel switch plates.

We ended up replacing all of the hardware that held on our handrail, since the old ones were in a dingy rusted brass and we went with nickel for everything else. We also added two more, so that the handrail is more secure.

And even though the color is all strange and you can't really tell that it's white, here's the upstairs view. You can see the new light, new thermostat, and (if you squint a little) our new door knobs. In keeping with my apparent obsession with replacing random brass-colored hardware with nickel, we replaced all our door knobs too (which ended up being quite a project, since the new ones didn't fit neatly into the holes left by the old ones).

We managed to hang a few pictures but haven't yet figured out what's going upstairs. We know we want to hang a lot though, because white really isn't our thing and it looks pretty sterile right now. Hopefully lots of colorful paintings and photographs will solve that problem.

Today we also tried to fill in our sparse lawn with more grass seed and spent the afternoon aerating and seeding. I have some before pictures but I'll wait to post them until I have (I hope!) some nice "after" ones too. We also set an ambitious plan for painting the master bedroom and should be done with that by next weekend.

Spring Projects

We are finally getting to the projects that we did not have time for in the fall, when we realized we had missed the warm weather window (how's that for alliteration?) for applying exterior paints and wood conditioners. D has been raking up and bagging most of the remaining leaves. Today he also applied Thompsons Water Seal to the little bits of bare wood holding up our back porch steps. I took on a few projects as well:

First, last week, I made what will probably be my only attempt this year at landscaping (I retreat inside when it gets warm and buggy), by adding a pretty pink jasmine plant (jasmimum polyanthum) to our lamppost. I'm not one for gardening but there was a great idea in a magazine to wrap a lamppost in chicken wire and then plant a viney plant at the base, so that it will grow up the post. Here it is before I filled in the hole:

I tied the (plastic) wire on with zip ties and then tied the vines to it gently with string. It doesn't look very impressive but the area gets a lot of sun and no little critters have tried to eat it yet, so I consider that a good sign for future growth.

Here's a picture of what it could look like in bloom, one day:

(photo credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/mondomuse/3268234488/)

While I was digging a hole for the jasmine plant, I started to realize exactly how annoying it was that we had a "bumper crop" of acorns this year. Besides loudly falling on my car all fall, those little guys really set up house. I photographed just a few but I pulled out dozens. They are in all our flower beds, making themselves comfortable--safe from any mowing activity:

At this rate we are going to end up living on an oak tree farm!

Today my big project was to cover the bare wood on our picture window. It's a lot harder to scrape paint, even barely-adhering paint, than I thought. I spent an hour or so hacking at it with a metal scraper, a wire brush, and a razor. Even though I figured the paint was not original to the house, I wore a little face mask in case there was lead dust. (They make home-buyers sign so many lead-disclosures that I think they made me a little paranoid.)

The obligatory "before" shots (this was after I scraped most of the loose paint, so the windows look even worse than usual).

We used Sherwin William's Duration Exterior in gloss finish. Since we didn't know exactly what color "white" we were working with and how much of the window's color was actually just dirt and aging, we went with untinted out-of-the-can white. It is definitely different, but we are hoping that a little rain, sun, and dirt evens it out. It's close enough that you can't see the difference in the photo:

(Isn't it nice of our cat to model for us?)

And finally, a few more random yard shots of our flowering plants. If you are able to identify any of them, let us know.

Pretty pink blossoms that the bees seem to love (also a view of our as-yet untreated window, if you look closely):

Beautiful white blooms near our garage.

And mystery buds on a tree in our backyard (with more pictures of the fully-bloomed tree to follow).

My Mind's in the Gutters

You may remember that back in February, we lost some gutters. Now that we're out of snowy season and entering rainy season, D and I are trying to find someone to replace them. As usual, we wrongly believed that a couple of estimates would be enough to help us make our decision. But with two contractors disagreeing on what we need, we have to wait for at least one more estimate to break the tie (or, more likely, offer us a completely different set of options that contradict the other two). They are so busy repairing the damage caused by the blizzards, that it will be a week before another company can even come out and give us an estimate.

Before we get any further, here's a picture of the damage, now that the snow is gone and we can see more clearly:

Basically the whole back of our house is effectively gutterless. I think we're talking about 50 or so feet. The real question is what to do with our fascia boards--the wood that the gutters are screwed into. Ours are completely bare wood. They are not painted, stained, polyurethaned, or covered in aluminum (they might be pretreated for termites or something--no idea).

Gutter company A says that the fascia boards do not need to be covered. They will put up a new gutter securely to make sure that no water seeps back there to rot the wood. The gutters will be screwed through the boards directly into the rafters, as opposed to just into the thin boards, so they don't come out again. Gutter company B says that the boards have to be covered with aluminum to prevent rotting, which would soften the wood and rip the gutters out.

DIY websites appear equally divided, so I don't think there's one right answer. It seems to me that the boards don't serve much purpose except to be a place to mount the gutters. From what I read, gutter installation instructions say if the boards are rotted when you take off the old gutter, replace them. It's not a big deal and it doesn't really seem to have a lot of repercussions if they do get a little damp and soft. Plus evidently they haven't until now, so if a gutter is installed correctly they will probably be protected.

Second difference: company A wants to give us cheap aluminum gutter guards with holes in them, probably something like this:

while company B wants to put on high-tech solid ones that uses the water's own surface tension to pull it into the gutter, like this:

Sure it's nice, but it seems like overkill and certainly not a cheap solution. From what we're learning, we will need to clean them either way. Maybe the cheap ones will need cleaning every other year and the expensive ones every 3 or 4 years, but gunk will find its way in eventually.

Third difference: company A wants to put on standard 6'' gutters. They won't fall down, they say, because they will be screwed in more securely than they were this time. Company B claims that 5'' are better because the added weight of the extra inch can be what pulls the gutters down inheavy snow/ice.

There you have it. Two completely different options with very different prices. I don't want to skimp but I don't want to be taken advantage of, either. I'm not sure the "best available" options are all that necessary. Of course I also don't want to cause future grief of gunked drains and rotting wood. I think a third opinion is necessary. And maybe a forth or fifth.

So don't be shy, blog readers. I think I scared most of you away from contributing with my poll last week, which deliberately did not have any middle ground between liking or hating contractors. But I need your opinions now: do we go with company A or B or find another middle-of-the-road set of options?

***

And finally, our garden continues to develop, no thanks to us. We discovered this week that we have roses!

A Poll While We Wait

We are working hard around the house and have a lot of projects in progress. I want to wait until they are done to blog about them but I didn't want you, my readers (all 4 of you...), to think I was neglecting you.

We are about to have our first experience with contractors (windows, in this case, but gutters and electrical work are soon to follow). So while we wait to hang our paintings and light fixtures in the newly-painted hallway, to get our new windows installed, to paint the bedroom closet, and to get some gutter estimates, please let us know what you think with a poll. Don't hold back--let us know how you really feel.

Spring Thaw

In January, I heard our house make a strange noise and it took me a little while to realize that it was our sump pump, doing what it was supposed to do and draining unseen water out from under the foundation of our house. Our sump pump is a very treasured object because of all the bad things we had heard from our more experienced home-owning friends and family about flooded basements. Also it was a feature sorely lacking on most of the homes that we considered buying. But our house has one and we can only assume it is doing its job, since we can't see any water in the basement. For that matter, we can't even see our sump pump:

For a reason that must have seemed logical at the time, the previous owners completely carpeted over the sump pump. There is no slit in the carpet, no little space without staples or tacks. No no, just a completely solidly nailed-in carpet. I'm sure at some point we will have to rip up at least the corner; and I haven't been able to figure out exactly where everything drains...So for now we just take it on faith that the sump pump is doing what it should be doing.

Which is good, since the ground has been slowly absorbing the several feet of snow that we got last month. And so the sound that seemed odd in January now can be heard every day and has become a regular contributor to the sounds of the house. Which is good, because there is a fair amount of standing water and, as the picture shows, more snow that needs to melt:

Close up of the puddles lining our mulchy patches (stay tuned for our feeble attempts at gardening said mulchy patches):

The sump pump is actually on the correct side of the house, where all that water seems to be collecting (it's just out of the frame at the bottom where the mulch turns to grass), so I guess the previous owners knew a thing or two about basement flooding.

The nice thing about the spring thaw? We're actually starting to see life! The garden is a big mystery to us, since we didn't move in until September when most of the spring and summer foliage was gone:

At least for now that life seems limited to flowers, but soon I'm sure we will see the more unpleasant side of it--the creepy crawlies.

And while it might not be alive, here is a picture of our new door wreath. I decided to show my excitement for spring by creating an artificial flower arrangement for the door. It turned out to be much cheaper to buy a $4 olive wreath branch and a couple of $1-2 fake flowers than a $35 fully assembled wreath. I just wove the wiry stems into the branches, no glue or extra wiring required.

Also we are discovering that even in March, black doors heat up to a pretty uncomfortable degree. Something we may have to deal with later.

Still more on windows

Are you sick of hearing about windows yet? Because I am. But in the scheme of all the things that we could have to fix around the house, windows might be one of the cheaper and less extreme ones. You may remember that as we wait for our new vinyl ones to be ready to installed upstairs, we had a little incident in our basement. Actually, two incidents, resulting in two broken windows. I wanted them fixed quickly so that the litter boxes could again be hidden out of sight in the unfinished part of the basement (they were temporarily in our finished area of the basement, in plain sight of my elliptical machine, which is not a very inspiring view when exercising) and for security.

First we had to decide how we wanted them fixed. My parents suggested glass block windows, which provide extra security, insulation, leak prevention:

Try as we might, nobody seemed to want to install them for a reasonable price. Some people didn't "do" installations at all, only offering to sell us the supplies at much more than we could find at Home Depot. Others would do both, for at least $500/window (which is about what we're paying for our nice new triple-paned argon-filled fancy shmancy ones upstairs that actually have complicated parts), and others (general contractors) would do the installation if we provided the windows and paid them about $300-400/window.

No thanks.

Next we looked into getting some glass cut. Actually pretty easy to have done at Lowes. We measured the window from the outside and brought the measurements there. For $5/pane, we could get glass. For about $35 for a whole sheet (enough for us to cut two panes ourselves), we could get acrylic. It was then we realized an issue we hadn't considered when we thought about buying glass block: fire escapes. Glass block is impossible to break through. So is acrylic. Now, we do have a walk-up door in our basement, but suddenly I wasn't sure I wanted the "extra security" of not being able to break the windows. People can't get in, but they also can't get out. And besides, that's what home insurance is for, right.

So we went with plain old glass and then had to content with the actual installation. It was a multi-step process, which D pretty much took care of all by himself (someone had to take the pictures...).

1. Chisel out all the old glass and glazing.

This was much harder than we thought, since the glazing was pretty much solid as a rock and applied copiously. Here's a close-up of what had to be removed so that the new pane could sit correctly in the frame:

Removing all that crud was what took most of the installation time. I used a little heat gun to assist but mostly it just took a few hours of chiseling. The finished result wasn't perfect but it was clean enough for the new pane to go in. We also had to be careful since the second pane in each broken window was still in tact, so we didn't want to hammer so hard that we broke that one too.

2. Apply glazing to the empty frame:

3. Carefully set the pane in the frame:

4. Apply more glazing to the other side of the pane. This took a lot more glazing than we thought and we ran out of one tube after just one window (we thought we could use one tube for both the windows).

5. Smooth the glazing with a putty knife and wipe up excess (like that stuff coming out of the caulk gun which fell onto the clean glass just after I took this picture):

6. Let dry, put back into window, and admire. (This picture really emphasizes the difference between new and old glazing--see how white the new one is and how dingy the old one is?)

In all, it cost about $40 (glazing was about $8/tube and we needed to buy the chisel) and maybe 4 hours of (mostly D's) time. It took almost as much time to call contractors for estimates. I think it was definitely worth doing ourselves and not paying for a contractor. Even if they could have removed the glazing faster, I'm sure it would have taken at least an hour or two at some exorbitant labor cost, plus materials. I will give D credit--he broke both windows but at least took care of them quickly and, it seems, correctly. Hopefully the panes don't come crashing out in a couple of days.

edited to add: D thought of the brilliant idea of adding bars to our two back windows, so that we get the security without having the heavy-duty windows. They are only about $25 from Home Depot and we can install them ourselves, plus they can open from the insides, so we are not compromising fire safety. Looks like that will be an upcoming improvement.

An Aside for Valentine's Day

Eight days late, I'm finally getting around to my intended Valentine's post, which is a bit of a departure from the usual home repairs update. In keeping with the "love" theme of the holiday, I wanted to write a post about how much I love our house. Now, it's not perfect and can definitely stress me out (we broke yet another window, but more on that another time) but it is a place that truly makes me feel comfortable and happy. Seems like a good relationship. Not only to I enjoy being at home but I enjoy doing things at home that I never enjoyed doing in our old apartment. Sitting and looking out our window (especially during a snowfall), for example. Or better yet (at least for those friends and family members who get to taste the results): cooking and baking.

I never liked being in our old apartment kitchen. There was no sense in making any significant improvements and everything was as cheap as they come. But here, we are lucky enough to have an already-remodeled kitchen that is beautiful and a place I really love to spend time (which is good, since it's where my computer desk is). And so, on Valentine's Day and in honor of the holiday's spirit, here is the proof of that love--a first attempt at homemade pasta and tomato sauce. A whole Sunday afternoon spent in a kitchen:

 

  

  

(No pictures actually making the pasta--my hands were too full of flour!) Fortunately the results were as tasty as they were fun.

Another unfun "surprise"

I had a great post lined up in honor of Valentine's Day about love and houses but then came this weekend's gutter problems and now another issue today, so a post about love will have to wait.

Last night when D was knocking yet more ice from the roof, I heard a loud crash. D said that it was just the sound of breaking ice but it really sounded like glass. Today I stepped into to the basement to find this:

Here's a picture with the flash so you can better see the evil-looking glass shards hanging from the frame:

Evidently the falling chunks of snow and ice shattered one of our basement windows. We are replacing six windows and none of the two that broke this year. Of course. So I cleaned up the glass pieces (which were everywhere) and changed the kitty litter (which was right under the window and ended up filled with little pieces of glass) and had a wonderful (and, fortunately, tall) friend cover up the hole:

Unlike our last breakage, we are going to have to fix this problem fairly quickly. First, because there is actually a hole, instead of a hairline crack, so it's really cold and also unsafe (though it would take a pretty brave and skinny burglar to get inside). Second, because it's at ground level, the melting snow is going to rip through that cardboard. Now we have to find a glass place and learn how to do some serious caulking. Apparently this is not something handled by windows companies, who only deal with new installations or replacements of full window sashes--nothing as unsophisticated as a pane of glass. Time to turn to google....

The unfun part of snow

Our house has received a lot of snow this winter. It's been very pretty and we've been very fortunate to not lose power, unlike many of our neighbors. Unfortunately the gutters are getting hammered. The snow is melting, then freezing into, onto, and over the gutters.

The front of our house gets the majority of the sun and is suffering most acutely from the ice issue. I've been knocking off the snow and ice from the edge of the roof every day. It hasn't been too hard, since I can reach the roof with a shovel from the ground.

I haven't been worrying about the back of the house since it's perpetually in the shade and shouldn't get the snow-melt to ice issue.

Wrong.

I think the kitchen vent in the bottom of the photo may have contributed to the extreme melting. I knocked the ice off, but the gutter was "linear-ized". That is to say, the gutter has changed in shape from a "U" to a "I". That'll probably have to be replaced come spring. Unless it can be bent back into shape.

Unfortunately that wasn't all. 

This portion of the gutter toppled down when I tried to knock the ice off it. The screws just ripped out of the wood trim. When the snow goes away we'll have to evaluate whether it can be bent back and salvaged. Probably not, though.

Unfortunately, the gutter looks like a continuous piece, so the entire gutter for the back of the house may have to be replaced.