Ooh la la

The drywall is done; the walls are primed and we are on to the fun part now. Justin and I donned our painting outfits this weekend and broke out the old paintin' tools. Justin rolled and I cut-in and we were able to finish 1.5 rooms and a closet in one day. On the second day, we were a little less productive. Most of the day was spent chasing cracks in the concrete floor with a grinder so we can fill them in with an epoxy and hopefully get a smoother floor to paint. While Justin worked with the epoxy, I wired up all of the outlets in the tool room. Justin installed the trim for the recessed lights and wired up the light in the closet.

This room just needs some concrete patching, some paint on the floor and some baseboard trim and it will be done. The nice cozy gray that we have in our bedroom is on the walls in this room.

On Sunday afternoon, we knocked off some more wall painting: the stairwell and new pantry. We opted to paint the pantry and the wall adjacent to the kitchen the blue that is in the kitchen. Presumably, you'll be able to see this area from within the kitchen and painting it the same color gives a nice continuity.

A rare action shot: me painting.

Here's one tube worth of epoxy in the cracks in our storage room. It looks like we'll be using about 4-5 of these $30 tubes to get this job done.

We will be prepping the floors for paint this next week and hopefully installing base trim soon too. Once these 2 rooms are completed, we are going to be able to move all of our stuff back into the basement!

Grinders

We are down the last item on the to-do list for the basement before we call in the professionals: rough in electrical for accent lights under soffit in living room. Nevermind that we keep finding things to append to the end of the list. Like grinding down the concrete floor so it will be more level and take paint better. And pulling the staples from the ceiling joists.

Justin spent the best parts of black Friday grinding the concrete floor. I spent the best parts cutting out gingerbread pieces to make a miniature replica of our house (more on that later).

 Here's Justin attacking the last 15 sqft of concrete (behind the washer/dryer). He's had a full day of vibrating.

Here's a progress shot--taken at about mid-day. Doesn't the ground side look so fresh and clean? It is really dusty so it's not so clean but it does look fresh!

Next week, we'll be insulating. Er, we'll be paying someone to insulate. And the week after that we'll be paying someone to drywall. It'll be a liveable space soon!

Here today, gone tomorrow

Well, our giant pile of rubble is packed up and ready to be hauled away. We got super, super lucky and found some folks via craigslist to come take the large pieces of concrete. It was a win win because now we don't have to pay for disposal/recycling and they get some free material to build their retaining walls. Justin ordered up a dumpster for the smaller scraps and we filled it up in quick time and still had a mini pile remaining. The pile wasn't large enough to warrant using a dumpster so we decided to take a trip to the dump with it. We also filled up our yard waste bin with so many weeds that we can barely move it. We are hoping that it is not too heavy to collect.


We have a lot of small pebbles and gravel that was under the slab of concrete and we are hoping that when we install our drainage trench and french drain, we will be able to reuse this material for that. If you look closely in the picture above you can see the contour of the filled-in trench where Justin installed water and electricity to the garage last weekend. I want to have an easy option for irrigating my vegetable beds when we put this yard back together and thought that a spigot off the garage was a better option than drawing water from the spigot on the house. And, despite being wired up inside of the garage, the previous owner never actually pulled power from the panel to power the garage. So, Justin's got the conduit in place to allow for us to actually wire the garage to a real power source, not just thin air.

A pile of rubble

We wasted no time busting up the concrete in the back yard. See, we need a place to put the dumpster for the concrete and we didn't want to put it on the grass because we are going to need to level it using heavy machinery which we also hope to use to bust up and load the rest of the concrete. Can you believe it took Justin and I less than 2 hours to build this pile? Big changes are coming to this backyard soon!

Another Snowy Sunday

Laura and I had the pleasure of working in the house on another snowy Sunday here in Seattle. To say that we are looking forward to having insulation and a working furnace in the house is a bit of an understatement. The fact that our fireplace is now out of commission due to the gas piping that has been roughed in there leaves us with very few options. Our borrowed electric heater stands no chance against the icy grasp on our house. Based on the no parking signs on our street it appears that the public utility may actually get around to replacing our gas meter this week which is the lynch pin to our temperature woes. Then there will be heat...lots of heat.

We each spent yesterday not working on the bungalow, but still performing manual labor. Laura spent the day cleaning up the yard at the West Seattle house and shampooing the carpets. I worked with my family at clearing out my great uncle's barn in Issaquah from its collection of 80+ years worth of junk. My mom thought I was crazy for ordering three 20 yard dumpsters for trash, metal and wood debris. We quit working around 3:00 when they were all full. I also returned my dad's truck to him after I picked up the plywood that we needed, and we talked about the medicine cabinet that he is going to build for our main floor bathroom. We are fitting this new cabinet into a void space that we built out for ductwork and plumbing which is going to give us a lot of depth for this cabinet. It will be a great period feature to the house.

Today was a day of miscellaneous tasks, only a few of which were critical path items. We started out with a trip to Lynnwood (north of Seattle about 20 miles) to buy an electric hand planer I located on Craigslist. The original window frames in the house were installed somewhat haphazardly and the plaster installers made whatever was there work. Drywall will not be so forgiving so the plan is to plane the window frames down to be flush or lower than the drywall. Laura took a crack at it today and it seems that this method will work. As long as it is done by next Sunday night we will be ahead of the drywallers.

While Laura worked on the window frames, pulled some staples in the flooring and squirted expanding foam insulation around a few floor penetrations, I poured the concrete in the two holes in the basement which will take care of that tripping hazard and open up a little more floor space. I also got started on fixing some of the holes in the first floor that are not needed any longer, as well as fixing up the main floor bathroom walls. Laura and I finished up the day by installing the backing in the upstairs bathroom and pulling the old hardwood floor out of the shower in preparation for a new subfloor. A full weekend!

Me floating the floor back in where the old furnace chimney used to be.

A very small representation of the foam job Laura worked on.

A fine example of some of our scrap wood backing. Think towel bar.

Mind-Numbing Equity

There's no term for the "equity" that we put into our house this weekend. We made up a new one: Mind-Numbing Equity. Neither of us worked up much of a sweat but we did spend hours at the same tedious tasks. With the framing near complete, we had to open up the basement floor to allow a post to be set to support some flooring joists below the bathrooms. Justin did all of the work here save for marking the concrete with the location.

Here's our 1 foot deep hole for the post.

While he was at it, Justin busted out the last of the bricks from the chimney so he'd have it ready when it is time to pour concrete patches.

Here are the remnants of what I was doing while Justin shoveled out the basement: staples from the carpet pad installation. There are about 600 million of these in the wood floors and stairs and they all have to come out before the floor can be refinished. I pulled them all out of the stairs this weekend.

Our other big task this weekend was to deal with the flooring. We know that there are wood floors throughout the house. Most of the house is fir flooring except for the dining and living which is oak. The oak flooring is in questionable shape and to date, we've been operating under the idea that the oak needs to be replaced because it can't be sanded down and refinished. The thickness isn't there--maybe we have 1/4"-3/8" with which to work. The fir on the other hand is 3/4" tongue and groove and is in pretty good condition--nothing a good refinishing can't fix. There are several places that will need to be patched due to moving heat registers, a missing chimney and a few walls in new places. In the downstairs hallway, kitchen and a little spot upstairs there is (was) glue-down vinyl/linoleum flooring. In the hallway, the flooring came up beautifully once we applied the heat gun to it. You can see the photo below where it looks nearly brand new. In the kitchen and upstairs though, it's another story. The vinyl is really stuck. We bought some sanding/brushing attachments for the angle grinder to try and remove the glue and paper backing from the flooring. Our method works but it is slow going. We're not sure what we're going to do for the kitchen which is approximately 200 square feet and will take a lot of time.

Here's a photo of the hallway minus the glue-down flooring.

This is the little nook upstairs that we carved out from the former bathroom that is now part of the hallway and might become a little desk area in the future. The lighter patch of wood on the right is the area that we used the grinder on. This area is about 5 square feet and maybe took us a half hour to remove the glue.This is the kitchen floor, just a little corner that we scraped the top part of the vinyl flooring from. The white stuff left is the paper backing and there is a really tacky, gummy glue under that.