The Dread House

Happy Green Room

2010-06-12T22:52:00.002-04:00

If the room in that last photo looked unfamiliar, it's because I recently repainted one of the bedrooms and put in some more of that faux-wood flooring.

Natural light.

Artificial light. (And FLOOR!)

This is my favorite room to spend time in now. I find the wall colors so relaxing - I painted the accent wall a nice, warm olive green, and the other three a soft sage.

Yard Sale SCORE

2010-06-12T22:35:00.003-04:00

Stopped by the library this afternoon, and this vanity caught my eye when we passed by a yard sale on the way out. We ended up getting it, along with a matching four drawer bureau. (Not pictured, as it's in the garage awaiting stripping and re-finishing. The vanity will have the same future, but I had immediate need for it inside.)

Underneath that horrible paint, they're nice, solid cherry pieces from the mid-20th century.

Bradbury & Bradbury | Art Deco Wallpaper | Volute Wallpaper in Platinum

2010-03-26T16:29:00.000-04:00

Bradbury & Bradbury | Art Deco Wallpaper | Volute Wallpaper in Platinum

Loving this one, too.

Bradbury & Bradbury | Atomic Age | Googieland

2010-03-26T16:20:00.000-04:00

Bradbury & Bradbury | Atomic Age | Googieland

This is almost exactly the sort of wallpaper I've been trying to find for the pink bathroom.

Halfway Bedroomish

2009-11-08T03:44:00.003-05:00

You probably don't remember the last time I wrote about the master bedroom. It looked like this before we moved in:

. . . D:

Now it looks like this:

It even has . . .

. . . a FLOOR.

2009-08-17T17:02:00.006-04:00

Hey, Emory!

Yes?

What's that you're lying on?

This? This is my favorite wrestling rug!

No, not that. That strange, shiny, floor-like material underneath the rug.

Gee, I don't know. I've never seen a 'floor' before . . .

. . . and it's not nearly as interesting as my rug.

Ah, well. Emory might not be excited, but I am! The Dread House kitchen - one of the dreadest rooms of all - has a floor, albeit a temporary one.

M is very fiscally responsible and likes to do things on a cash-only basis as much as possible, so the permanent hardwood floors (along with a new heating system that has to be put in at the same time) are still on some distant horizon. And I just couldn't take it anymore: that dark, stained concrete that mocked all attempts to clean it, that rough, snaggy surface that assaulted the eyes as much as it assaulted bare feet, and worst of all, that mysterious black stain that extended four feet across the kitchen floor. So I decided I had to do something that would make it livable for me, a very visual person, until that someday comes. The answer: those oft-decried peel and stick tiles. Yes, I've replaced the black stain on the floor with a black stain on my soul. But the kitchen, at least, is now a bright, pleasant place to be.

(Apologies if the contrast/brightness is off in the pictures. My laptop died and the desktop monitor has serious display issues.)

New Address!

2009-07-23T22:17:00.003-04:00

Note: I've changed the URL for the blog. The new and improved address is http://thedreadhouse.blogspot.com/. Makes more sense, doesn't it?

2009-05-13T17:00:00.000-04:00

I hate this house.

2009-02-14T16:10:00.004-05:00

Well, we haven't posted in a while but not for lack of incidents. Mostly it's because my day job has taken all my time and energy so the only things going on have been the things going wrong.

We've had plumbing that wouldn't drain - even after running the auger through it, and feeding it digestive microbes for a week; the oven went into overdrive, wherein the only way to stop it on it's quest to reach the surface temperature of the sun was cutting the power at the breaker.

I'm in the process of working out what to plant this year, after last year's experiments. The ollas worked well for the small areas they covered, so I'll probably be getting many more of those as I convert the patches of grass to garden.

It's been very cold this winter, so thankfully we got the first phase of the attic insulation in before the cold arrived. We still have about two thirds of the attic to cover, but while the cotton insulation is so much easier to work with than the fiberglass, it's also more expensive, so that's going to have to be done in stages.

Here we have the original insulation, as it extends under the attic "floor" (the boards around the trapdoor), I think it is as old as the house...

... that's actually one of the deeper areas. We're supposed to have R38 in this area - I'm not sure what thin, dirty fiberglass-and-mouse-dropping, insulation counts as, but that's not it.

The insulation arrives...

... there were nine of these blocks, each containing eight pieces. The trapdoor was big enough to carry two up at a time. It took a while to get them all up into the attic. There's some irony in the recycled denim, ecofriendly insulation coming in non-recyclable plastic wraps.

Several hours of lifting later, we have a pile in the attic.

Installing the new insulation wasn't bad. Removing the dirty old stuff first was a lot less fun. Almost to the point where I was seriously considering paying someone else to do it.

Those three little strips were two hours of hot, unpleasant work, in a face mask and long sleeves to keep the fiberglass dust out. Next time I do it while it's grey and cold out - the attic gets warm even in late autumn if there's any sun.

Linen Closet Makeover

2008-09-10T16:44:00.006-04:00

A small but satisfying project.

The linen closet, like the rest of the closets in the house, was wallpapered with an ancient used-to-be-taupe patterned paper. Why anyone would wallpaper closets is beyond me, but there they were. The bedroom closets were stripped via hours of work with spray bottles of vinegar and scrapers.

Not so the hallway closet. The thought of spending hours in a narrow 2x2 space, inhaling vinegar and spiders was too torturous. Thus, fully aware of my crime against proper home-improvement technique, I painted over the wallpaper.

Before:

After:

The color is 'May Apple', and the shelves (not present in photos) are presently being given a new coat of white.

Garden

2008-05-25T13:52:00.009-04:00

We haven't posted much recently as we haven't been getting much done on the house. The yard is the only thing that's been making any progress. Little by little we're getting pieces of it converted into garden. This is very slow going, especially at the back, as the top couple of inches of soil is full of ... things*. Which means we can't just plow under the whole yard and start from scratch.

Some of the things we get from filtering the top couple of inches (through a garden sieve, by hand, this is why it's taking a while):

Bits of plastic
Rocks (of varying sizes)
Pieces of fiberglass insulation
Pieces of glass
Nails
Children's toys
A bungie cord
A patch of tarmac
Wire
A twelve foot long piece of two-inch pvc pipe, not connected to anything.
bits of wood (painted)
Japanese beetle grubs:

The "raised" vegetable bed is actually level with the original surface, but four inches above the level we excavated down to in order to clean the soil. The sides of the bed are constructed from material from the demolition.

Initial frame, with a layer of not-quite-compost from the pile (mostly half decayed leaves) to at least have some organic material in the mix.

Filled with filtered soil from the hole, using rocks we pulled out as spacers:

Putting the peas in. You can see the neck of the Olla we got from these folk - it's basically an unglazed pot that you fill with water. The water seeps out through the pot, watering the plants from underneath - which promotes better roots and avoids leaf rot from watering the plants from the top.

The peas, two weeks later:

At which point they got eaten by rabbits. So we added some, unsightly but effective, rabbit netting to foil the cute critters:

Then we dug up the next patch, didn't have time or energy to make another raised bed, so planted potatoes in the dug patch:

The peppers refused to sprout, but we had successful seedlings of cauliflower and brocolli, so those went out a couple of weeks later:

The beds by the kitchen window aren't doing so well so far. The best growing item at this point is a parsnip top we rescued from the compost pile (where it was happily growing). Here they are back in March:

And today, still droopy and brown:

Except the mint, of course, which is still trying to take over the garden:

By midsummer, we might actually have compost. The huge pile of leaves, etc. from last autumn is finally heating up (in part due to being tossed every other week - that's hard work with around 200 cubit feet of wet leaves), and cooking down into (notifcably smaller) compost:

The cherry tree behind the house bloomed spectacularly, at which point we discovered it was a grafted tree (which explains some of its mutant form), so we have a white side and a pink weeping side.

The rose bush beside the house is once more trying to eat the house:

A New Addition

2008-03-14T01:00:00.004-04:00

An exciting new addition to the family was welcomed to The Dread House today. Our little bundle of joy was introduced to the household this evening -- red, wiggling, slimy, and ravenous.

Introducing...

Bag O' Worms!

Yes, 1000 red wigglers arrived at the house today! We assembled their home -- the appropriately titled Can O' Worms -- prepared the bedding, and freed the worms from their transport bag and box.

Placing the bedding (coconut fiber) in the bin:

Bag O' Worms!

Pile O' Worms!

Exciting worm close-up!

Our worms are currently engaged in what is known as "worm run". Meaning, of course, they're all trying to escape frantically from the bin...to what destination, we don't know. It's supposed to take about a week for them to settle in; in the meantime, it's possible we'll have a few casualties as they escape from the bin and either dry up or get eaten by the cat, whose food bowl is near the worm bin. Tragic!

As the system reaches maturity, which will take up to 12 months, we can expect our worms to increase in number until they reach 10,000-15,000. Hopefully, they'll enjoy our food scraps!

New Roof: The cause!

2008-02-10T21:44:00.001-05:00

The female PO stated that the reason the extension went on the front of the house was they were tired of clearing out the huge pile of leaves that gathered there in the autumn. The extension was the cause of the leak (see previous entry about demolishing it).

So I was dreaming of this huge pile of leaves for the compost pile all gathering themselves without any effort.

You can imagine my disappointment when this is what we got:

Yes. That's the entire pile. Everything that gathered on the porch.

That is the reason for the entire roof replacement!

New Roof: Day 1

2008-02-10T19:39:00.000-05:00

The crack of dawn (7:46, December 27th):

Unloading the tiles:

Getting that truck into the driveway was interesting. The driveway is one car wide all the way to the curb. The road is only just over two lanes wide. That they managed to only flatten about a square foot at the end of the driveway is quite impressive, but took a while.

Up to the roof

at which point the constant cold drizzle caused them to call off for the day as it wasn't safe for them to be on the roof and they'd be letting the rain in.

New Roof: Day 2, Part 1

2008-02-10T19:16:00.001-05:00

7:48 am, waiting for the roofers to arrive, you can see the mess of the old roof in front of the piles of tiles on the roof.

8:03 am, unloading tools as the sun comes up and melts the frost on the ground, and more importantly, the roof.

8:13 am, and it's already getting difficult to get outside the front door.

"Oh my god! It's full of stars!"

(actually that's the underside of the roof, with all the little nail holes, not a giant obelisk orbiting Jupiter).

8:18, stripping off the roof, the sun is just getting above the treeline

8:21, the sunpipe domes sitting on top of their boxes:

Why are these out in the back yard when it's going to be hours before they are ready for them? Because the garage door was rapidly disappearing behind the pile of roofing tiles.

8:39: The front side of the roof is almost clear and they are starting on the back.

9:17: As they started on the back, I climbed up the mound outside the front door to survey the damage to the roof. Can you spot where the leak was?

About a third of the way up the roof, near the top of this image, there's a triangular day spot. That's not a shadow, that's a hole. One of the roofers but the scraper blade through the roof it was that rotten.

9:18: The mound I was standing on to take the previous shot. You could just about get in the front door.

9:18: The front of the house

9:19: The back side is completely clear

9:20: Just part of the far side to go

New Roof: Day 2, Part 2

2008-02-10T19:14:00.000-05:00

9:29: The light shines through... illuminating the mess under the roofing boards.

9:29: The somewhat tidy attic in the dim light from the window.

9:34: Taking one of the rotten boards out.

9:46: The underside of the above board.

9:50: Surveying the damage

Removing the boards meant I could stick my head out through the roof to look at the damaged area and see how extensive it was. It could have been worse. The beams look bad but were actually fairly solid.

9:50: A slightly wider shot with more visible damage and a leg to give you a sense of scale.

The beams are 16 inches center-to-center.

9:50: A detail shot of the damage.

10:00: Meanwhile, on the back of the ranch:

The far side of the roof was spared the attentions of the previous owners so was in fine shape. Annoyingly so was the roofing they took off on that side, it just wasn't worth attempting to keep when they were doing the rest. (It had another 2-5 years of lifespan and the roofers wouldn't warrantee any of it if they did a partial job).

10:24: Putting in the replacement boards.

10:24: The rest of the crew had the front under sheets on.

This is the part that actually keeps most of the water out. The lower edge is a different colour as it's an ice shield as well.

New Roof: Day 2, Part 3

2008-02-10T19:12:00.000-05:00

10:30: The back seam doesn't look good either.

This was also not a surprise, it matches up with the water damage in the kitchen ceiling.

10:35: So off comes more boarding.

The facia piece is also damaged, but it's not structurally significant and will dry out once the rest is repaired.

11:09: With the board on the front replaced, it doesn't take long to get the underlay on.

The ice protection goes up the valley too.

11:43: Marking off the hole for the larger of the two sunpipes.

This pipe was the most problematic item of the whole process. The larger pipe only just fit between the roof beams (14.5 inch clearence, 14 inch tube), and the instructions were just complex and unclear enough to confuse the roofers.

1:06pm: Shiny domes for the sunpipes waiting for the roofers to finish their lunch.
As they arrived about 15 minutes after I got up, that was fine with me.

1:09: The new shingles start going on the roof.

The edges are the tricky bit, once they had the overlap right they were very quick.

1:23: Fourteen minutes later, one guy has done about half of that face of the roof.

1:23: and the foreman has done over a third of the front slope whilst still keeping the rest busy.

1:26: The far side is coming along, and you can see the hole for the bathroom sunpipe.

1:59: In goes the dome for the bathroom.

2:05: The back slope is almost completed.

3:33: The front is almost done, except for the recalrant dome.

The guys at the top of the valley are putting in the last of tiles on the new ridge vent on that side. The guy on the ground was obviously the lowest in the heirarchy - he spent the entire day cleaning up the old roofing material and moving it to the skip.

4:27: All done, just cleaning up.

Early morning some time later, the final results:

... and the new roof makes the back look even worse. Once it's warmer painting that is high on the list of things to do.

Snow

2007-12-22T19:18:00.000-05:00

Our first snowfall in the house

(nighttime snow. you can see the large compost bin under construction behind the tree).

The next morning, not long after sunrise. Everything looks pretty with snow.

Detritus free garden

2007-12-22T19:07:00.001-05:00

The Township Building Inspector finally signed off on the demolition (the requirement had been to remove the pile from the back yard). So now we have a clear garden ready for planting things in the spring.

(Pictures taken early in the morning whilst S. was still asleep. You can see the start of the leaf pile behind the tree. On the left is the 3x3ft wire compost bin that S. thought might be large enough...).

Adventures in Plumbing

2007-12-22T18:59:00.000-05:00

Today the leak:

was back. Apparently, just fixing up the POs hack job:

wasn't sufficient. However, having demolished bits of the interiors of the kitchen cupboards last time, this time it was easy to fix using... drumroll ... the right parts! It's amazing how much easier, cleaner, and less leak prone it is when you connect pipes using a joining piece between the fittings rather than chopping them off and using clamps.

Yay?

2007-12-17T04:07:00.000-05:00

Some relatively good news, for once. When I was in the kitchen last night, mixing up some bath salts, I heard a hissing noise and noticed dripping water coming from beneath the cabinet where the leak was...the inside of the cabinet was also wet, indicating that the leak might have nothing to do with the heating system, but rather with the water lines going between the sink and dishwasher.

M checked it out today (with minimal dismantling of our counters and cabinets) and tightened a few connections...and the leak appears to have stopped!

We had some minor annoyance when we drove around later to look at roofs - the roofers gave us the addresses of other houses they'd done so we could look at roof colors - and we ended up in several more post-war planned developments wherein all the street names begin with the same letter. Last time we went out we were in the "R" neighborhood; today we ended up in "Q" and "C".

The annoyance entered in when we discovered that not only did the streets begin with the same letter; some of them had the same danged name. So we were looking for two houses on Crystal Place, but we actually ended upon Crystal Drive, looking at the wrong houses (both streets had the same numbering system!). It ended up being too dark after that to see what the roofs on Crystal PLACE looked like.

Dreadville Doldrums

2007-12-15T02:42:00.000-05:00

I don't know whether to declare this blog on hiatus or not. I certainly haven't felt like writing in it.

I don't really feel as thought we've gotten anywhere in the past few months. Mostly, I sleep too late, eat erratically, and spend too much money on my revolving perfume oil collection. Hoorah, depression.

Last month we had our furnace serviced...wherein "serviced" actually turned out to mean a nearly 5-figure sum to have the whole bloody thing replaced when the old one (not serviced in years by the P.O.s; what a shock) spewed near-lethal amounts of carbon monoxide when turned on. Oh, and the water heater leaked gas.

As the additions have been demolished, we're in contact with the roofers again to have the roof replaced, tentatively scheduled for the end of December. It'll probably snow, hail, rain, and sleet to deter us, though.

There's been a mystery water leak in the kitchen ever since the heat was turned on. It seems to be getting worse and, unfortunately, the only way to access the leaky area is to dismantle/destroy/demolish our kitchen counters. Whoop-de-effing-doo.

Other news? Hmm..

M's leaf pile in the back yard has grown to gargantuan proportions. We only have three trees, so he's been raiding the neighbor's yards for leaves, up to the point of liberating the leaves from their yard waste recycle bins. We dragged down four large pallets that were for some reason in our attic to corral the leaves, though there are more than will fit.

I got bamboo shades for the front door and the dining room window and installed them. Such excitement!

I unpacked and/or stowed away the boxes that were still cluttering up the living room. It's nearly box free now, and actually looks like a living space. There's still a whacking great hole in the wall, and we're using one of those cotton tapestry throws as an area rug, but at least it isn't boxville anymore.

Varmints

2007-11-16T00:38:00.000-05:00

Some festering toerag stole our ladder!

The sad part -- well, other than being robbed by filthy thieves, of course -- is that we don't know when, because we can't remember when last we saw it. This, despite walking past it every day for the past month or so in order to use the front door. Rrgh.

Smashy Smashy - A Pictorial Journey of Destruction

2007-11-07T22:33:00.000-05:00

Up to the minute updates! ...are not the case on this blog. So, it's been quite a while since the last post. I started this one on 10/11, hoping for the inspiration to make it a bit more detailed...but that hasn't happened.

Since our last update, we've demolished both of the previous owner's additions, successfully hung some curtains, and had a near disaster with our furnace. More about the latter two later. In the meantime, here is the skeleton of yon ancient post:

~~Two weekends ago~~ A while ago, M's father came over from Merry Olde England to help us demolish the PO's leaktastic additions. Thanks to my back acting up, I wasn't much help, but they and A got a lot done in a short time.

Here's the back addition -- the 17x10 "family room" -- before the destruction. The thing that kills me is that the windows they installed (or, more accurately, built around) in there were the only really nice windows in the entire house.

A shot of the inside, after the wall panels came off. They painted the stucco green before they put the wall up. Only Satan knows why.

After pulling some of the insulation out of the walls, we discovered where all the ants that would occasionally invade our kitchen were coming from...

Our poor, poor roof:

Nearly there...

A little push, and the wall falls down!

Fare thee well, ye spider-ridden, below-grade, flooded, duct-taped, stinky room o' filth!

...Well. Not quite. Most of it's still in a pile in our backyard.

Pretty Pic Spam

2007-10-06T12:08:00.000-04:00

From the 250 acre park down the road from our house.

Just to prove that our being masochists wasn't the only factor behind the decision to buy this house. We like pain and nature.

Trachelas Tranquillus

2007-09-25T15:02:00.001-04:00

Nothing that looks like this --

-- should ever be in my kitchen sink*.

I managed to overcome my terror to catch her in a (very large) glass and put her outside. Normally I can't do this with hunting spiders, but she was rather sluggish from having gotten her feet wet in the sink and was unable to climb the sides of the sink herself.

The Demolition Begins...

2007-09-16T14:45:00.000-04:00

I started on the interior of the foyer. Until we can move the piano the POs left behind, and unwire the ~~fire hazard~~ electrics, it has to maintain a semblance of water resistance. Remarkably, some of it was reasonably well constructed. All that meant is that it was easier to take apart and some of the materials were salvageable.

Starting with the front wall, the plastic covered paperboard came off easily enough. The chipboard behind it was starting to compost however...

The door frame is glued to the brick (well, I did say some of it was well constructed, not all...)

*gasp* there was insulation in the wall.

The planks on the ceiling came off relatively easily, once the first one was out. Getting the first one out however, required some work. All the wall panels around the upper edge had to come off, as did some of their supporting struts. That wasn't difficult, everything was held together with a couple of nails and some glue.

There's even more insulation in the roof space. This space is actually better insulated than the attic... you know the bit above the interior of the house, where the heat is...

Is that roofing tile I see before me?

Indeed it is:

Behind the upper paneling you can see the original roof. The roof for the addition just rests on it:

And there you see the cause of part of the leak. If water gets under the roof of the addition, it comes down the valley... and in through the hole drilled to put the wiring through! Just out of picture to the left is one of several wiring junctions, complete with bare wires. That hasn't been taken out yet as I need to shut off the electrics for the entire house, because who knows what circuit(s) that's actually wired into!

Salvage: The main planks from the ceiling came off cleanly, as did the roof insulation, the pieces against the wall to the left are trash however - wood covered in glue, plastic coated paperboard, etc.

Whilst doing some gardening as a break from demolition, I uncovered a toad. It seems smaller than the one we had earlier in the year, so there's two of them around at least.

And the monster plant lurking behind the house, fighting it out with the rosebush to see how much of the garden they can take over, is flowering. Only one flower for half a dozen seven foot stalks, but it's pretty:

License to Smash

2007-09-12T18:48:00.000-04:00

In case you can't be bothered to click on the picture, here's what the most important part reads:

"Owner is hereby granted permission to perform the following work: DEMOLITION OF ADDITION".

Mwahaha.

(Actually, the deed change has yet to be registered with the township, so it's really the previous owner's name on the permit. Does that mean we get free labor?)

Me Is Woe Begon

2007-09-12T13:51:00.000-04:00

The sink arrived. It is too big. If the toilet were situated only a couple more inches towards the tub, the sink would fit. Alas. (It would fit in the other bathroom (which, by the way, is SMALLER), but I am not - not, I say! - converting that bathroom back to its original pinkness.)

I'm still proud of my bargain sink, given the prices I see some restoration/salvage places charging for them (and especially given it was unused and still in its original box). But. But. But.

Now I'm left with 50 pounds of pink vitreous china I have no use for, and 5 pounds of white, rotting cardboard that still needs to be replaced with something.

Assuming my pink toilet fits (the sink was shipped first), I'll then be left with no other option* but to continue searching for a pink sink that fits. They exist. They must. I've seen small, white wall-mounts on those aforementioned salvage places; I've even seen a seafoam green one (why can't my bathroom be that color?); surely, somewhere out there, is a pink one, just waiting to find a home in my bathroom. (And, surely, it will be too freaking expensive, just like that seafoam green sink. After you've paid $5.25 for a sink, there's no way you'll pay $325!) There is a 20" wide one on eBay at the moment, but the style is abhorrent. Well. More abhorrent. My Holy Grail of pink sinks would be the twin sister of the seafoam green sink above.

*Yes, I realize that I also have the option of just forgoing the whole idea of restoring a bathroom that should never have been made in the first place. But, see, I get obsessive once I decide to do something. The stupider that something is, the less capable I am of letting it go.

Lights!

2007-09-07T23:32:00.000-04:00

I'm not entirely sure about how the glass is frosted, but this looks very close to what I want for the bathroom. I do wish they provided a side view - I'm concerned about the '10.5" Ext.' measurement, which I presume is how far it sticks out from the wall. Seems a bit much...

(Light is the Astoria by Quoizel. Yes, I removed the link to a particular retailer that I originally posted, as I found the same exact light elsewhere - several elsewheres - for half the price. The extreme nature of the mark-up at the first site is unfathomable to me.)

I told my grandmother about the pink fixtures last night, and I believe she is the only person who is actually thrilled about the idea in a non-perverse way. I shall have to do her proud.

Now to find a vanity/mirror...

I Aten't Dead

2007-09-05T16:00:00.000-04:00

But if one could be tried and executed for Crimes Against Good Taste, I might be.

Earlier this week, I bid for and won a vintage toilet and sink set on Ebay for my bathroom retrovation project. If you remember what my bathroom looks like, there might be little warning bells going off in your head. If I tell you that the fixtures match - oh, how they match! - the bathroom, those bells might be turning into full-blown emergency sirens.

(If you've erased the horror of the bathroom from your memory, let me fix that for you with a picture of the floor:)

...That's right. The toilet and sink I bought are pink. To match the pink floor, the pink tub, and the pink wall tiles.

Lest you think I'm doing this merely to shock and terrify unsuspecting visitors, let me list my reasons:

I have read, and I firmly agree, that white fixtures only make the pink stand out even more.

As I have written before, the tile is mostly in good shape, so I don't find it practical to destroy it. Even though that is probably our eventual plan, it certainly isn't going to be happening any time within the next 5 years. Making what's already there look better is less expensive than any other option.

The toilet and sink in there now are not in good shape. They are icky. The sink, in particular, is a piece of utter crap made of cardboard and plastic. Before I found this set, I was planning on just buying a cheap (though not as cheap as the current one) new white sink solely so that I would not have to look at that rotting, stinking hulk any longer. (It's a vanity sink, the bottom of which has almost completely rotted away, so I sincerely mean the 'rotting, stinking' part.)

These are my aesthetic plans for the bathroom (not in order):

Install pink sink and toilet.

Paint walls above the tile grey. There are six Sherwin-Williams shades of grey that I'm considering.

Get this bathroom shelf. I think it has a bit of a retro (wherein 'retro' = ugly, but suitable) look to it.

Get grey and/or black towels.

Find and install new mirror/vanity and new bathroom light. This is the part that will really be challenging. I prefer to have sconces on either side of a vanity, and I've seen some nice, vaguely retro ones around, but our sink is too close to the wall for that option. So I need to find another type of light that a) I like and b) doesn't look out of place.

Quite frankly, I think most 50s-era vanities and lights are hideous, so I'm not going to be aiming for authenticity here, just for something that won't look too out of place. The other challenging bit here will be the installation, which for some reason really intimidates me. Possibly because of the mess the POs made of the previous light installation, which I will sum up with two words - 'particle board'.

Get some sort of framed vintage poster or advertisement for the wall. Preferably with a smidge of pink in it somewhere. I'm considering going meta and using an ad for a pink 50s bathroom.

Replace bathtub hardware to match whatever hardware I end up getting for the sink.

Now, to be practical, I don't know if this toilet and sink will work out. Assuming they get here unbroken, the sink in and of itself presents the problem of being a wall-mount. None of the directions I've encountered for installing wall-mounts give you advice on what to do if there's tile in the way. I assume I'll have to cut some of the tile out in order to access the wall. I'm a bit worried about tile carnage, but we do have another bathroom full of the same pink tile, conveniently hidden behind wainscoting. (Okay, actually, I'm worried about it being done wrong and having the whole wall collapse, crushing and/or maiming us in the process, and it will be all my fault for having purchased the Sink Of Death. But I'm paranoid like that.)

I also noticed, as I poked at rotting-hulk!sink the other day, that the metal thingies on the wall where the water thingies (Yes, I will endeavor to learn the official terms for these items before embarking on this project!) come though are very, very rusty. Combined with the lump of play-dough (I swear!) holding the pipes together and the state of rotting-hulk!sink, I fear there is a leak. I don't know what, if any, damage has been done to the floor and wall by this. Needless to say, we'll be finding out sooner or later.

Got Pumpkins?

2007-08-19T16:59:00.000-04:00

The secret is that I really have a fondness for junk, especially nostalgic junk. I like antique and secondhand shops. I like yard sales.

And I like our attic. Thus the reason I continue to post pictures of The Stuff that comes out of it. Here are a couple other items M and A dragged down today:

The ship paintings look much better in the photo... in person, the black lines are this odd, ropy, licorice like material. The doll has clearly seen better days...her hands and head have fallen off; the arms appear to have been repaired with tape at some point.

Speaking of POs and their crap, our neighbor reported to M that he ran into the POs somewhere. Who told him that they 'left the place in great shape'. Ha. Ha. Ha. Oh, and in case anyone reading this isn't already cynical about taking advice from the folks staffing Home Depot, let me inform you that one of our POs now works there. Think about that.

Polishing Poo

2007-08-16T18:10:00.001-04:00

This is not going to be the sort of inspiring 'I salvaged this door from the den of a wizened hermit, wrestling bears and mountain lions along the way; then I stripped it with 10 kinds of strippers (all reviewed here for your convenience), sanded and stained it back to its old luster and fitted it with the knobs I salvaged from another wizened hermit' story you usually find in houseblogs.

No. This is an ugly door. It probably cost $15. You can reach underneath it and stick your hand up the bottom and into the door. Seriously. I've encountered hollow doors before, but never ones quite like this, which doesn't even bother with a piece of...whatever it's made of...across the bottom.

At some point in the future, we are going to replace the cheap!doors with real doors that you can't accidentally kick holes in. (I suspect there will be some not-so-accidental holes in these when that day comes.) But at this point, we have other, more expensive priorities that do not involve trimming, hanging, and possibly reframing doors. The current doors fulfill their function of opening and closing (...mostly), so for now they stay, even if they are festering eyesores. But...they are so, so festering. And I have to look at them.

In particular, I have to look at this one:

when I get up in the morning. (Yes, I tried cleaning it when we moved in. Really.)

After slapping a coat of white paint on the bathroom door (which is directly across from the bed; oh, the horror) the other week, I realized that it does make a big enough difference in the room that it isn't actually a waste of time to paint something we're going to get rid of eventually anyway.

So after putting another coat of paint on the window frame today, I decided to use the rest of the paint in the tray to put a coat on the door. I didn't bother cleaning it first (blasphemy) because I learned from the previous attempt that it's not possible.

First coat in progress (ooh, contrast):

First coat drying:

Better, yes? (Ignore the frame.)

The window:

A picture of its previous incarnation is in this post.

And here's a picture of our crepe myrtle in bloom to make up for all those ugly door pictures:

Shiny new look?

2007-08-15T14:01:00.000-04:00

So I haven't been posting much, but I have been continuing my search for a sensible, intuitive graphics program I can run on my Mac. Thus far I've tried LiveQuartz, Inkscape, Seashore, and Lineform. I won't review them here, save to say that I've spent a lot of time shouting at the computer. I spent 10 years using Micrografx Picture Publisher (which, admittedly, had its own share of issues) and I've yet to find anything else that combines versatility with straightforward, easy-to-find controls in the same way.

At any rate, Lineform and LiveQuartz were adequate enough together that I finally made a header for the blog. I'm not entirely sure I like it, but I don't entirely like the house, either, so there you go. The muddy, retro look is ugly, but ultimately what I was aiming for.

In other news: a plumber showed up last week (yes! really!) and we now have a working washing machine. We can wash clothes in our own house.

More remiss (and ultimately insignificant in the face of the giant mess that is our house) updates to come.

Foiled Again!

2007-08-05T01:02:00.000-04:00

What's wrong with this picture?

Yup, another curtain disappointment. I don't believe I wrote about the first case -- about a month ago, I ordered a pair of 36" curtains from Target, only to discover that this measurement was actually the average of a set wherein one curtain was 35" and the other 37" rather than any indicator of the curtains each being, say, 36".

So, back they went to Target, leaving me to once again hunt for curtains that come in a wide enough size range that I can get matching curtains for the two very differently sized windows in the master bedroom.

I found what I was looking for at BrylaneHome, where they had grommet cotton panels in a wide range of lengths. The smaller two panels arrived this week (other set is on backorder); I immediately unwrapped one of them and showed it gleefully to A (who was here scraping floors and walls) and crowed about finally having even, matching curtains...before I took the second one out of the package. Ah, the folly of hubris -- as you can see, I learned tonight that, despite both packages being labeled 52"x30", one curtain is, in fact, 52"x34".

&#%@.

Compare and Contrast

2007-07-20T16:30:00.000-04:00

Normally I wouldn't be too thrilled to live in a tract house with four clones on the same block, but in this case it gives me a chance to see, roughly, how the front of our house should/could look. All 5 houses are built in an L shape; all are brick and stucco and have 3 gables..except for ours, which is the only house with only 2 gables, one in the back and one on the garage. I suspect our house was built first (we've been told it used to be a 'model home'), then the builders realized it looked like crap without a gable in the front and subsequently altered the design for the rest.

Over the years, people have made a few changes to the houses, primarily to the garage/entryway areas. The house with the most extreme modification is ours (of course), where the POs converted the open front area (I don't know what it's called) into an enclosed room and altered the front of the garage. The second most extreme is the house down the road where they added a bay window to the front of the garage, surrounded it with yellow vinyl siding, and covered the stucco sides of the house with matching siding (which looks as weird as it sounds).

A few weeks ago, I surreptitiously snapped some photos of our neighbor's house to compare them with ours.

Here's his house:

Here's ours (gawd):

(While it's the least of our worries at the moment, you might notice we're missing a cap on our chimney. I wish these photos were taken from the same angle, but I obviously can't go into his living room to take a picture of our house.)

After I found those old photos in the attic, one of which looked like it might be our once-upon-a-time front door, I looked again at the photo I took of the neighbor's door,

and compared it to the door in the picture:

It does indeed seem as though that's what our front door used to look like.

Here's what it looks like now:

Note that we have to go through a pair of sliding glass doors and through the addition just to reach it. A number of people, including M when he first toured the house, have mistaken the garage door for our front door.

The reason for this post is that in order to have the roof replaced*, we're going to have to tear down the addition so that we're not roofing something we don't want in the first place. The question is...what goes in its place? Do we just leave it as a covered patio? There's a seam in the concrete and a ceiling beam in the addition that makes me think there used to be something there...but what? This would be easier if I could just go and have a tour of the other houses...

The neighbor has this:

If that's a little room, I'm not entirely sure how it would be accessed (in our house there are two windows, one in the dining room, and the other in the utility room, that look out into the addition)**. One or two of the other houses have something similar, only there's a door in the center and it's set back a bit further. The seam and beam in the addition would place our former 'something' in the same place as the neighbor's low wall and windows. I wonder if M would be willing to go next door and ask the neighbor if he knows what our house looked like before the addition... (Even if I weren't shy, I'd still be too embarrassed by the sorry state of our lawn and yard to do so.)

*I forgot to mention that M and I went up into the attic after leaky Wednesday to check it out.. We found a roof beam so damaged by water that 2-3 feet of it is moldy and rotted. Fabulous! (I won't mention how M unwisely decided to walk around on the roof, which I believe is supposed to be left up to people who know what they're doing so that one doesn't inadvertantly cause even more damage. Nope, I won't mention that at all.)

**Now I feel stupid. We drove past his house the other day and I noticed that there is a door into that room, right next to the garage; it's just not visible in the picture.

When It Rains In Dreadville

2007-07-18T15:36:00.000-04:00

Looks like that whole moving-in, buying paint, and thinking we could wait a year or so before demolishing the PO's additions and replacing the near-the-end-of-its-lifespan roof thing was foolishly optimistic. This will mostly be a photo post because I'm too effing depressed and full of hatred for the POs and this squat, ugly, borked up house to bother writing much.

Addition #1 (PO's Foyer/Mudroom/2nd TV Room):

Addition #2 (PO's Family Room/Dog Room/3rd TV Room):

How PO butchered roof in order to build Addition #1:

Our dining room ceiling, leaking and bubbling (maybe more water is reaching it since we removed stuff in the attic?):

Just for fun, our flooded road (that nice-looking front lawn belongs to our neighbor, not us):

I'm no expert, but...

2007-07-16T21:00:00.000-04:00

...I suspect that the way the POs converted the bath into a shower is not the correct way to do it. Destruction is usually pretty satisfying, so I decided to take on the task of dismantling their handiwork this week.

Here's the bathroom as photographed by M when he toured the house for the first time:

(No, I don't know why they had shower doors and a shower curtain up.) I took the shower doors out weeks ago to open the space up a bit.

After I took the doors out, I was able to examine the shower more closely and thus learn How Not To Build A Shower:

Screw strips of wood into walls over existing wallpaper. Don't bother sealing that or anything else against moisture.

Nail unevenly cut pieces of tileboard to top two feet of wood, disregarding instructions on back of said tileboard telling you explicitly not to do any such thing.

Glue unevenly cut pieces of hard plastic sheeting to the rest of the wood and to the existing tile below. The more glue the better.

Caulk? What's that?

Nail pieces of wooden molding up around shower edges so as to hide uneven edges and hold shower doors in place.

Fortunately(?), the examination also showed that what was visible of the original tile seemed to be intact. And indeed, after pulling down the plastic, all of the tile except for an area that appears to have once had a built-in soap dish is intact. I consider it a dubious fortune because it's all a hideous, repellent shade of pink. I suspect that the bathroom at one time had a matching pink sink and toilet to go with the pink floor, walls and tub.

21 pieces of wood, 52 screws, and one bandage later (helpful hint: if you think you should be wearing work gloves but are too lazy to find them, find them anyway)...

...destruction phase 1 was complete.

Now to scrape off all that glue and wallpaper backing...

Two Painted Rooms! Two!

2007-07-16T15:00:00.000-04:00

No, we haven't been buried alive by piles of Stuff, never to see the light of day again. The combination of weather in the high 90s and the return of my allergies (probably because the cat is pulling out her fur again) has led to a severe drop in my energy levels. While this is good in that the rest has helped my back recover - I haven't needed my muscle relaxer in a week! - it's less good for housey progress.

I did accomplish two things last week. One, I put together my cheap!desk from Target and yoinked out the old 'counter'. Two, I painted the master bedroom.

I have conflicting feelings on painting, especially when it comes to that room. One day, we're going to have to do some work on the trim in that room, as well as install a pocket door for the bathroom, which is going to mean the room will need to be repainted. The trim along one side of the bathroom door and the bottom of the wall between that and the closet door is odd... It's not wood which was cut to be trim; it's just wood that the PO slapped up and painted, so it's wider than the rest of the trim in the room. I should have just pulled it down along with the rest of the baseboards, but it was hot enough last week that I wasn't thinking clearly, illustrated by the fact that I climbed up my stepstool, trim brush in hand, and nearly started painting before I realized I hadn't taped the ceiling.

(Somewhere in my amnesiac madness, I apparently taped the cat as well and turned her into a crazy-eyed demon.)

Thusly, 'Painting with no air-conditioner when it's 95F INSIDE' joins my list of Things I Shall Never Do Again (only as of yesterday do we finally have an air-conditioner in that bedroom, due to delays caused by badly-timed wasps). Unfortunately, this whole angst-ridden event was unavoidable. Here is why:

That is what the bedroom looked like as painted by the POs. Keep in mind that this is a fairly small room and we have exceptionally low (7.5') ceilings. It is not, therefore, a room that could ever look good painted the color of the interior of Dracula's grandmother's coffin. The POs also didn't use enough coats of paint (I've heard you have to use a LOT when you paint something red) to get the color even AND it looks like they used a satin or gloss finish. At any rate, it was disturbingly ugly and not something we could live in.

We used two layers of primer to cover it up before we moved in and lived with that until last week. Then on Saturday and Sunday of the junk-removal weekend, M and I primed and painted the ceiling (rather than just getting a standard Ceiling White, we got the 'white' shades for each of the different colors we chose for the rooms..so this ceiling is 'Mild Mint' to match the 'Morning Breeze' of the walls). On Monday and Tuesday, I mustered up enough fortitude to paint despite the heat and this is what the walls look like now:

I am really embarrassed about the sad state of that 'after' picture, both in terms of photo quality (the ceiling really isn't that uneven! I swear!) and our mess of a bedroom, but I got tired of trying to get a good shot and I don't see the point in doing up the room nicely until we actually have floors and curtains and such. We also need to get a smaller bed so that things can be arranged properly... it wouldn't be such a problem if it weren't for, say, needing to be able to get to the bathroom door. (Our current bed is actually 'beds'. M and his dad built these stacking twin beds that can be stacked (duh) or put together to make one king bed. My half has a 3" memory foam mattress over top of it, which is why it's so uneven looking - I tossed our winter blanket over it all to attempt to disguise this, but it was unsuccessful. Our plan is to get a queen-sized bed for that room and distribute the stacking beds to the other bedrooms.)

Serendipity

2007-07-09T22:16:00.000-04:00

We had another productive weekend on the junk removal front. N & A (actually a different N & A than the ones we've mentioned before) came over and hauled stuff (some of it very heavy, including two cedar chests and a sewing machine) down the rickety steps and out onto the side lawn for sorting.

Firstly and most importantly (to me), we found this, the reason for the title of my post:

The red vase is one I've had for over a decade. I got it from my great-grandfather's house after he passed away. The green one? Was in a box in the attic of this house. Neat, huh? I realize they're not anything really special, but I'm pretty stoked about my newly matched (and Yule-ish) pair of little vases.

Back to the lawn --

-- where we sorted things into junk, nifty, and possible sale/salvage piles. Being a bit of a magpie myself (uh-oh), I had to save a few things from being junked, like the ice skates, a little wooden tray, and a strange metal clock-lamp shaped like the hull of a ship. (I did not keep the wig.)

It was really difficult for me to allow the tons of vintage curtains to go...but neat as they are, they're not at all to my taste and I would never consider using them. A woman stopped by and claimed some of them along with a few 50s style chairs and about 10 cans of Zud.

I can only hope the rest of it wll be taken before the next storm, as I don't think little rivers of Zud flowing down the street will endear us to the neighbors.

Some of the really nifty things we found were a couple of old pictures that had our house in them. So we have a small shot of what the front of our house used to look like before the POs added their strange little room, one of our side yard, and one of our cherry tree 23 years ago when it was still only 4 feet tall.

This is how our attic looked at the end of the day:

Admittedly, I'm not posting a photo of the other end of the attic, which still has a big box pile and the 4 foot stuffed Snoopy... but this is nonetheless amazing when compared with the attic before. :D Now we can actually check out the insulation and wiring up there and look for water damage from the previously leaky roof.

And then! A man stopped by this evening and took away all of our dirty, stinky baseboard heater covers! Wow!

...what.

2007-07-06T17:24:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I think of our PO as a benign (but considerably less genius) version of Bloody Stupid Johnson.

Don't have cable television in all rooms of the house, including the additions? Just make holes in all the exterior and interior walls and run yards more cable through!

Can't pay for the alarm system anymore? Hey, why not just cut the wire and shove it under the carpet?

Family members don't appreciate your scintillating sense of humor? Scrawl, in permanent marker, 'the queen is a lezbo!' on the inside of your workshop cabinet and get a secret chuckle every time you open it. (Seriously, what!?)

Dining room not deadly enough? Bust a socket of your low-hanging light fixture and leave bare live wire sticking out. Make rowdy houseguests run the Electric Gauntlet.

Don't feel like moving entertainment stand to install new carpet? Don't bother -- carpet can be cut around your furniture.

Front door keeps denting baseboard heater? Install a doorstop...

...inside the heater.

It Came From The Attic

2007-07-05T16:52:00.000-04:00

Long ago, in those halcyon days when we were still blissfully ignorant of the just how much work this house needed, we had the requisite house inspection. The inspector, frequently thwarted in his task by the POs' furniture filling every spare inch of space, still managed to present us with a Binder Of Ill Tidings about hazardous carpets, damaged walls, extension cords, unsecured toilets, etc. Scattered among these items and others was the frequent observation of, "Due to the cluttered conditions of $AREA, a complete visual inspection was not possible." When it came to the attic, "cluttered" was upgraded to "extremely cluttered", and he was unable to enter at all.

Lulled into believing that the month between inspection and closing would give the POs enough time to move all of their crap out, we were unprepared for The Stuff. (I was completely unprepared, living two hours away and not setting foot into the house until after closing.)

Closing time came and went; M generously gave the POs several more days to move The Stuff; they put a bit of money in an escrow account should it arise that The Stuff was not completely removed. It seemed like a reasonable amount of money, given what was left on the property and the complete and utter naive belief that normal people have - to wit, that other people are good and kind and don't leave heaps and heaps of filthy, flea-ridden shit behind for the rest of us to clean up. (I don't think I've mentioned the fleas before...)

However...both M and the real estate agent somehow managed to forget about the attic - the attic filled floor to rafter with what turned out to be the leavings not only of the POs but of the PPOs as well.

The escrow fund will not cover us renting more than the one dumpster already filled and taken away, so M has been hauling a bit out at a time and putting it by the curb. (Unsurprisingly, the agent has been unable to get the POs to sign the necessary form for the money for the dumpster to be transferred.) Occasionally, some ~~crazy~~ great people stop by and give our ~~piles of crap~~ glorious attic items a new home.

Here are some of our finds that are not old holiday crap, broken glasses, knives, encyclopedias, beer, old mail and tax returns, curtains, curtains, curtains, more curtains, or ancient vacuums:

Accordion. Might work - I attempted to play it and it made horrid, soul-killing, neighborhood-scaring sounds. I believe this is normal. Complete with hokey velvet-lined case.

Car clock. Classy!

One of several ice skates. This one is lined with fake fur.

A rather nice little sidetable. Currently occupied by some of my plants.

Lovely (um) vintage lamp and one of two blue mystery barrels.

Profiles in Crap

2007-07-03T14:27:00.000-04:00

I ordered a cheap rolling desk from Target today to replace this.

This 'counter' - another craptastic PO DIY job - sits in the kitchen corner. I attempted to remove it when I was ripping out the kitchen carpet (yes...the KITCHEN carpet - a green, filthy horror stained with cat piss and god only knows what else) by unscrewing all the metal supports from the walls and removing two legs. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that it was also glued to the wall. The original intent was to dispose of it in our long-gone dumpster, but it proved too difficult and we had too many other things to worry about at the time.

(Here's a reminder of how filthy the kitchen carpet was..this is a picture of it sitting in the dining room, rolled up and ready to be disposed of.

Note the contrast between the somewhat stained parts and the pure brown parts. There's a lingering, immovable stain on the concrete in the kitchen from the pure brown parts. I've no idea what it is, but it is impossible to clean.)

Much to my chagrin, the ghetto counter has been very useful over the last month. As you can see, it is in use as a phone and laptop stand. (We have very, very little counterspace in the kitchen.) However, in the last month the glue holding the counter top to the backsplash has come loose and the table is only being held up by its one remaining leg and by its leaning against the backsplash in the corner. It wobbled fiercesomely yesterday when the cat jumped up on it, so I consider it bordering on dangerous to keep around and in use (it's quite heavy despite being only particleboard with a laminate top). It also once gave me a rip in a new pair of pants when the cheap wood trim on the front came loose and left a nail exposed, so I'm quite hostile towards it anyway.

I really hate furniture with wheels, but I think they give the above desk a neutral sort of look that means it won't be too out of place in a kitchen...and I can put my cookbooks (as soon as I figure out where they're packed) on the shelves on the side.

in which we attempt to clear drains

2007-06-30T22:28:00.000-04:00

Attempts:

N's 25' auger - eventually worked its way into the drain, clearing some blockages. Intermittently added boiling water to see if it could dissolve some of the built up soap goo. Auger reached its limit with only slight improvement in flow. Not enough to take outflow from washing machine.
Power auger rented from Home Depot - would not even go around the bend, was not flexible enough.
50' auger (bought from Home Depot) - eventually went 15' into the drain. Still no noticeable improvement.
Haul washing machine into kitchen, put pipe into sink, turn on long enough for it to drain, watch with concern as the sink fills up to the two thirds point before draining.
Hand three weeks worth of laundry to A, who volunteered to use their machine to wash it to spare me the three hours in the laundrette.
Purchase bacterial drain gunk eater to see if that'll work (without filling the house with noxious fumes from chemical drain clearer). Wait until morning to see if it's had any effect.
If that didn't help, hire plumber when we can afford it, (some time in August at the current expense rate), and hope that the (probably cast iron) pipe (which runs under the concrete slab foundation and is therefor inaccessible without cutting through said concrete) is not broken or corroded through.

Actual achievements for the day:

Sorted through three rubbish bins in the garage to make one and half bins of actual trash, and a pile of tools and other miscellaneous things that are actually usable, and a pile of kindling. Left tools and other things from the garage by curbside for people to take. (Half of the pile is already gone).
Filled four 30 gallon bin liners with rubbish from the attic. Placed a few of the not-trash items by the curb with the rest of the pile. Things found in this process: the other boot (the first one was found several weeks ago), an inflatable pink Easter egg, enough Christmas lights to go around the entire house (if any of them actually worked), broken tree decorations, the tree, a box of fake pumpkins, a truck bed liner...
S scraped paint of part of the dining room wall, and cleaned the back room somewhat.
Mowed the rear meadow. (It's not a lawn, or a garden, it's a patch of greenery, some of it actually grass (there's at least five different varieties on this property) with up to a foot of height variance, and not, of course, a nice slope there.

There's now actually a path from the ladder to the attic window that can be traversed without risking life and limb. This enables the window to actually be closed (the POs left it open) in the event of, say, rain, thus preventing further water ingress.

Stupid People Tricks

2007-06-30T15:44:00.000-04:00

Don't do this:

Get stung by wasp that's crawled into cleaning rags because you left the back door open in order to air out sewer odor eminating from laundry drain. (M)
Spill globs of spackling on sheets and pillowcase while patching gash in bedroom ceiling while you do not have a working washing machine and all your extra sheets are being used as floors. (Me)
Wait a week before emptying a wet/dry shop-vac that you have used to suck up soap-dirt-water-pure filth from floors. For future reference, doing this is probably the easiest way to get eau de pig farm without the pigs. And yes, I know what pig farms smell like, having spent two summers of my youth on one. I quite like pigs. I quite dislike the smell of pig lagoons wafting through warm, foggy morning air. (Me)

Belongings of POs currently sitting at curb:

Training toilet
Red beanbag chair
Cat litter (they got rid of their cat a year previous to selling the house, according to the neighbor - the tub of unused cat litter is, at least, less disturbing than the litterbox full of dirty litter and poo that they also left behind)
Box o'knives (I doubt the wisdom of leaving this at the curb, myself)
Charcoal (we put the grill out previously and it was taken within an hour)
~~Treadmill, minus control panel (that went in the dumpster long ago)~~ Taken!
~~Cat carrier~~ Taken!

Slow going

2007-06-30T12:33:00.000-04:00

Slow and sporadic... that's me this week. Other than Water! Water Everywhere!, it's been pretty dull around here. My mother came out in the beginning of the week (actually, I took the train out there and then drove us back - my first time doing long-distance, 75mph driving) to help. It was hot enough, though, that neither of us did much of anything while she was here. The air conditioner doesn't cool much of anything other than the living room which is currently too full of boxes and other stuff to work on.

We did strip some paint in the dining room, which led to the discovery that there's a 4x4 foot area where the plaster's been replaced entirely by drywall. It makes one wonder just what happened to the wall that the POs needed to replace that large a section of it.

I've been cleaning the baseboard heater (pipe and fins only - the surrounds have been taken out entirely due to the stench) in M's room. A number of fins had to be cut through and removed because they'd corroded to the point of not staying in place. This picture:

is not of that section. It is of the cleaner part of the heater. Ah, the scent of urine and corroded metal! mm.

I also primed some of the trim in my room, touched up the bits of ceiling I'd managed to paint purple while painting my walls, and stripped more paint from the trim in the wallway with the heat gun. It might have been the fact that I'd taken my muscle relaxer an hour previously, but I found there to be something strangely (and worryingly) somnorific about using the heat gun.

I've been frustrated about not being able to work on the houseblog (due to laptop death), almost as though getting it in the state I want somehow contributes to the state of the house itself. ...The saddest part in all this is that I do not have a single picture of the house that isn't so crummy that I'm unwilling to use it in a banner. The air conditioner in the front window just adds to the sad, gloomy look of things. (Actually I had a post in progress about the mood/air of the house due to its reject style roof, but, naturally, it was ON MY LAPTOP.) Ah, well...

in which we attempt to install a washing machine

2007-06-29T22:24:00.000-04:00

The POs took their washing machine with them. A friend (N) gave us their old one as they were upgrading. Sounds great, until we enter the twilight zone that is this house.

Day 1 (Tuesday)

The washing machine is delivered by N.

The pipe from the previous machine was still attached to the drain hole - they'd just hacked it off part way down. The pipe removed easily enough, and the waste pipe for the machine fit into the rubber connector. All seemed well.

That is until we tried to actually use the machine. At which point the water just drained right out the bottom and down the drain hole rather than filling the machine. Not helpful, and inexplicable. Until you learn that the machines require the pipe to travel up above the top otherwise they do just this, and it's only recently that a few manufacturers have come out with machines that don't have this fundamental design flaw!

So I investigated what this was supposed to look like. Everything I could find said that there should be a 2" wide stand pipe (there wasn't), with a p-trap (basically a ubend) in it, and that it needed to be open ended (not sealed to the drain hole). Fixing this seems simple enough. I should know better by now.

The rubber connector was 1" wide, and connected to a 1.5" adapter to a 2" drain hole. The rubber connector removed easily enough, but left a bent metal connector on the 1.5" to 2" metal adapter, which was screwed into the actual drain hole.

Day 2 (Wednesday)

First trip to Home Depot provided pipe (helpfully pre-cut to the lengths I needed), along with a replacement seal for the bathroom toilet tank (a separate issue - that tank was running continuously).

This connector was, of course, a non-standard octagonal contraption that was thoroughly stuck and too large for any tools I had, something I'd neglected to check the night before.

The evening also gifted us with a thunderstorm, leaking back windows in the rear bedroom, a small lake in the "family room" (that's a whole other DIY disaster courtesy of the the POs), and a power outage to go with the 95F heat.

Day 3 (Thursday)

A second trip to Home Depot for tools did not solve this problem - the weird octagonal adapter did not quite fit in the "universal" plumbing tool (due to its octagonalness). A side trip to Lowe's for an energy efficient (or as much as there is) air conditioner (seeing as Home Depot doesn't stock such) was successful - both in acquiring said air conditioner and a sudden downpour dropping the temperature by 20F and making it less urgently needed.

Day 4 (Friday)

N to the rescue with tools that might defeat the octagonal monster. They do indeed fit, but the monster refuses to move in the slightest, even when doused with WD-40. The application of one of the pipe pieces to the tool handle provided enough leverage (simple tools win again), and the monster gradually yielded.

The pipes all fit snugly together (even without any form of glue they appeared to be water tight, and very hard to take apart again). So I connected them to the drain hole, connected up the washer and turned it on. All seemed to go well, at least until the machine started to empty out. Which is the point we discovered that the drain itself does not empty. Or at least not anywhere close to the speed required.

Day 5 (Saturday)

In which we attempt to clear drains.
(This is a scarier process than might be obviously apparent - I found popcorn, among other things, in the dryer vent when I cleaned the laundry room... -S.)

not so stubborn paint

2007-06-24T20:51:00.000-04:00

Having exhausted the hi-tech options, we tried the low-tech ones...

It turns out that simply spraying the recalcitrant paint with plain water (not the water & vinegar mix that was left in the spray bottle - that reacts with the plaster), leaving it a minute then applying the scraper gets 90% of the paint off. Much of the rest is the "washable green" layer that wipes off with a damp cloth.

So the remaining part of the hallway took about four people-hours, as opposed to the 8-10 (with much dust) or 20 (with heat gun) it would have taken otherwise.

It still needs to be sanded I think, to level out the rough spots, and needs many little pock-mark holes filled in, but it could be painted once the holes are filled and look alright.

The main hallway looks like it could be done in a day using this method. :-)

Stubborn paint

2007-06-24T13:22:00.000-04:00

Removing the residue of the paint on the plaster walls.

The walls are not flat (that's 50 year old plaster for you), so both scraping and sanding takes much longer than it would otherwise. The plaster absorbs the heat from the heat gun, which means the paint is much harder to remove than it is from wood.

With the heat gun, followed by washing the green residue off the wall.

This patch (below the line, which is about 5 feet up) took about four hours.

This was after fixing the toilets yesterday, and I learned some things that might make it go faster in future: the angle of the scraper makes a huge difference for example, and the heat gun gradually gets more effective the longer it's on - it doesn't reach its highest temperature for several minutes it seems.

A (small) section of this was done with a blowtorch rather than the heat gun. (See what happens when I'm away? Walls are SET AFIRE. - S.) This is somewhat faster - the heat is more focused and direct and the paint just blisters off, but it does leave faint scorch marks on the plaster itself.

This is the opposite wall of the hallway, after about 1:45 hours with a power sander.

The sanded wall is considerably smoother, with some of the unevenness of the wall reduced. It produces a lot of dust however, even with the dust catcher attachment.

The little bit above the line, on the left near the corner, that looks green was done with the heat gun and scraper, to do a compare, that's what it looks like before washing off the green.

Given the thickness of some of the remaining paint, a thicker primer is not going to help.

Adding a surface skim of plaster would solve both the residue, the unevenness and the remaining pockmarks.

Toilets

2007-06-23T16:24:00.000-04:00

Well, having replace the wax seals on both toilets (due to their leaking whenever flushed and adding to the odors of the house), I discovered they were not bolted down.

The flanges the bolts connect to are either (a) buried so that you can't get a new bolt in, or (b) broken off entirely!

So at some point we need to take the floors up and replace the flanges.

At least the eau-de-toilet is no longer adding to the ambiance.

Motivation...or lack thereof

2007-06-20T13:55:00.000-04:00

Here's a small section of wall in the entry way showing the stubborn remains of old paint that didn't come off with the latex layers. This section is mostly tan. There appear to be two layers - the tan layer (top) and a green layer (bottom). The green layer seems to be water soluble. When M was washing the walls, the sponge and wash water turned green...but there are still green bits on the walls, so it didn't all wash off.

This is what the walls in both hallways, the kitchen, the living room and the dining room (probably - we haven't stripped the latex paint off in there...YET) look like.

It's beginning to make sense why the POs put such an incredibly thick coating of paint over this and why some of it was 'artistically' (I use that word in the most generous way possible) mottled and textured. Because this old stuff? Does not come off unless you have superhuman patience, tenacity, and SKILLZ.

So we bought a heat gun (the cheapest one, erm), which is fantastic...on the trim. Not so the walls. I estimate the project to take months, if not years, using the heat gun (I can't tell if this is an exaggeration born of despair or not - it is truly that slow).

Other options are: chemicals, that heat thing that costs $400+ (given the large area that needs stripped, the latter might actually be cheaper), or slave labor.

...I opt for trying a thicker primer before exploring any of the above. (Ah, yes, contributing to the mess are the two layers of thin, low-VOC primer that I already put on one wall in the long hallway, which served no purpose except to prove that thin, low-VOC primer does no good in most of our house.)

2007-06-15T11:08:00.000-04:00

We moved Storm and the rest of the stuff from the apartment in last night. Mostly plants, cat accoutrements, and cleaning items.

She seems to be adjusting well -- exploring all the rooms, jumping in the windows, and being frustrated about the high window in the bedroom that she can't reach (the sill is too small for her, anyway).

The screens in the living room windows are not cat proof... I tested them by pushing on them and one of them fell right out of the window into the rosebush. They're some sort of new fiberglass and plastic screens that don't have proper locks. While I hate wrestling with old metal screens, they, at least, do not fall out of windows with a little nudge. ...You know, there aren't even any storm windows on these things, so maybe you're not meant to wrestle with the screens to begin with. I bet the rain doesn't sound the same on them.

We still have to move Spook and my furniture from E-town...eventually.

Next on the task list is getting both my room and M's room (we have three bedrooms - we've each claimed one of the extras as 'personal space') done (to the extent that they can be 'done' with no floors) so that we can move stuff into those rooms in order to complete the living room and master bedroom.

My room only needs a few things. I need to finish scrubbing the old wallpaper glue out of the closet so I can prime and paint it, fix the holes M and I made in the drywall (one of the few odd spots of it) when trying to get a wood shelf-ish thing off the closet wall (of course, this involves actually getting the wood things off the walls), and painting the trim. I don't think I'll worry about the trim for now. Spook's going to stay in there for a bit, so I need to get the screen repaired in one window and obtain a screen for the other (if possible). I also need a new cat tree so that she can actually reach the windows. She will climb the wall, or attempt to, if she can't get to them.

M's room needs more work. The windows in there are moldier, the concrete still has carpet glue all over it, the walls still have a few bits of paint to be scraped and there are a lot of holes to fill. There's also the issue of the corroded heat pipe (baseboard hot water heat)...

This weekend is the toilet project. Yay.

Yay!

2007-06-14T10:11:00.000-04:00

Some good news - the ladybugs came back! A few weeks ago we discovered that the cherry tree had aphids on it...LOTS of aphids. (I thought the leaves were just turning black for no reason, but someone else noticed that the black leaves were covered in tiny black bugs.)

So I ordered 1500 ladybugs from Gardener's Supply. They arrived via UPS in a little box with holes poked in it. The ladybugs come in a mesh bag filled with moist wood shavings. They become active as soon as you take the bag out and unfold it.

One website advises you to refrigerate the ladybugs until it's time to put them outside (at dusk), so that they're slower and don't fly away immediately. According to Gardener's Supply, you can refrigerate them for a couple of days, making sure to give them a 'moist raisin' to eat.

At any rate, we refrigerated them, box and all, in the produce section of the fridge until dusk. We put them all over the lower part of the tree and the most affected leaves, and they seemed happy enough... But they were gone the next day! I regretted not having gotten the mesh sheets that Gardener's Supply suggested to keep them in place.

However, M informed me in beginning of this week that they were back. There aren't 1500 of them, but there are a fair number of them back and feasting. I can even see a few from the family room window. Even better - we have ladybug larvae now, too! They're bizarre enough looking that I'm glad Gardener's Supply sent an info sheet on what eggs and larvae look like. Apparently the larvae consume even more aphids than do the adults.

Unrelatedly, this rug would be awesome for the hallway.

2007-06-14T10:01:00.000-04:00

I didn't get a whole lot done yesterday. I cleaned the baseboard heater in the dining room, in an attempt to eliminate the remaining scent of dog. This was unsuccessful, but it did reveal that the color of the pipe is silver, not black.

I started painting the shelf in the family room, but didn't complete it because a spider had built a web on the bottom of it.

I also began painting the door in the family room, but then realized that the old paint just strips right off... So it turned into a paint stripping project instead.

I found this incredibly useful looking tutorial yesterday when I was looking up why a toilet would leak from the base (which both of ours are doing, naturally).
Replacing A Toilet Wax Bowl Ring

Paint! (again)

2007-06-13T15:31:00.000-04:00

What I was basically told when M bought this house was:

Carpets are dirty and need to be torn up

Needs new paint

Yard not in great shape

Now, the carpet step has been completed. It was probably the most disgusting thing I've ever done (pictorial evidence available at my Flickr page). We're down to concrete (with some remaining mastic stuck to it). Fine, okay, it still smells but it can be dealt with.

But I'd expected to paint weeks ago. We've done tons of prep - wallpaper stripping, paint stripping, sanding, patching, cleaning... But only a single room reached the point of paint -- my room which is, after a layer of primer and two layers of paint, now a pale lilac.

The master bedroom has been primed twice and is ready for paint...but we were forced to move in before the house was ready, so now it's filled with furniture. At some point, when I'm capable of lifting anything (I hurt my back painting the ceiling in my room!), I'll move the furniture and paint.

The hallways, foyer, and living room were thought to be ready for painting, but the hallway has proved that this was a wishful, unrealistic thought. The layers of paint we stripped were latex. Underneath that is a more stubborn, flaky-not-peely paint. I don't know if it's an old oil-based paint, or if it's some kind of plaster specific coat. We thought it was sanded to the point that we could paint over it, but the unevenness is very, very obvious even through two coats of primer.

Apparently it's common practice in England to put up something called lining paper when painting over plaster that's previously been painted or wallpapered, but I haven't seen anything of the kind here. It would make a smooth surface, I suppose, but the idea seems kind of counterintuitive to me.

The other option is to get some kind of chemical paint stripper (I'm looking at Peel Away Smart Strip as a relatively non-toxic option) but the price, given the area we'd need it for, is daunting. Not quite as daunting as stripping yet another layer of paint off all of those walls again, though...

Plaster! (again)

2007-06-13T15:14:00.001-04:00

Yesterday's disheartening moment came during the project of removing the faux popcorn ceiling in the kitchen.

It did have to go -- the PO applied it badly. It looked like uneven cake icing, with great peaks and waves along all the edges in much greater quantity than that which graced the rest of the ceiling.

I know, I knew, that this spray-on popcorn is generally used to hide some greater flaw. I did not expect this 'flaw' to be a poorly repaired four foot hole in the ceiling and crumbling plaster walls above the stove.

The project was eased, for the most part, by the fact that rather than scraping all the icing off I was able instead to just peel the thick layer of paint underneath it off, the icing coming with it. But then I reached the Hole. My scraper met resistance. There was no paint underneath this section of icing. There was...drywall?

I gave up on that section for the time being, as I couldn't scrape the icing without scraping the drywall as well.

I started on the lower sections of ceiling, also popcorned, over the fridge, sink and stove. I ran into trouble when the top coat of the plaster began peeling off along with the paint. Over the stove, the top coat simply shattered and fell off at the touch. So there's a four to six foot section of upper wall/ceiling that either has no finish coating or has finish coating in imminent danger of falling off. The brown layer of plaster is worryingly crumbly/fragile to the touch, there are cracks in it, and there's a distinctive brown/rust stain that looks like the mesh layer inside the plaster. Water damage, yes? That would explain the repaired hole in the ceiling, too (although it would have to be a LOT of water).

So much for painting the kitchen anytime soon.

Apparently, plasterers are rare and expensive these days. I really dislike the 'hide it with drywall' idea. I want to have the plaster fixed, not hidden. I don't feel capable of doing this myself, though I'm sure that's the most cost effective way. I'm not sure how much of the brown coat would have to be knocked out to make the repair... Presumably the cabinet would have to be removed, too. augh. (And the tile above the stove? And the hood fan??)

Welcome to The Dread House

2007-06-13T15:10:00.000-04:00

Prompted by the niftiness of those little progress bars in other home renovation blogs (!?) -- okay, by both that and the fact that 'home renovation blog' is, apparently, its own genre of blog -- I've started this one.

I hope writing about it will make the whole thing seem less hopeless, daunting, and disheartening.

Welcome to The Dread House.

What is The Dread House?

It is a 1950s brick ranch built on concrete slab with a decent attic (except for the STUFF - apparently the leavings of more than one PO - filling it) and no basement.

It has plaster walls on metal lath and, currently, no floor except for aforementioned concrete slab.

It has two additions added by the POs -- one of these is a 'family room', the exterior consisting of cheap siding and duct tape; the other is a...um...'foyer'. Right, a 'foyer'. Looking at the houses around us, it appears that it used to be a porch with a roof. It is now an enclosed room that forces us to go through a sliding glass door before we even reach our real front door.

It has not been maintained in years.

It is filthy and was apparently inhabited by incontinent dogs.

It has numerous other bizarre and inexplicable 'repairs' and DIY jobs left by the POs. These include: the aforementioned additions, a table/counter glued to the kitchen wall, mysterious wiring (where does it go? where is it from? what is it for!?), a copper pipe that only goes part of the way through the wall and exits into the front garden, a pile of lumber and windows in the yard, an extension cord that runs under the driveway, wallpaper everywhere, a shower installed patchily in what used to be just a bathtub (they didn't repair the holes in the closet wall they made to put this in), toilets that aren't bolted to the floors, etc, etc, etc.

(...Oh, and one of the other things the POs left behind? A dog they buried in the yard several weeks before closing! We're entirely unsure what to do about that.)

I've been working on the Dread House for about 4 1/2 weeks now. Most of the time it's been just me. Some of M's friends have contributed, too, one of them coming over every other day for a couple weeks.

This is what we've accomplished:

Removed all carpets, padding (modern and coconut fiber) and tackstrips. Scraped floors numerous times to remove remnants of padding. The carpet project was the worst - every room except for the utility room and bathrooms was carpeted. Yes, this includes the kitchen. While the utility room wasn't carpeted, it did have an area rug which was fused to the tile.

The carpets were all FILTHY. The pads were moldy. This is presumed to be related to the incontinent dogs I mentioned earlier.

During this stage of demolition, I had to wear a respirator in order to avoid the stench. I went through a box of tissues a day because of my allergies. You could smell the foul odor from the driveway.

Removed baseboards and most baseboard heater covers. Again because of the stench.

Cleaned refrigerator. This was a bigger task than you might think. It was May. I found what I believe to be their Thanksgiving turkey in one of the fridge bins. (M insists it was an Easter turkey, but poultry does not turn quite that green after a single month.)

Stripped wallpaper in living room (all walls, floor to ceiling, complete with decorative border at top), two bathrooms, dining room (bottom half of walls), master bedroom (decorative border), kitchen (decorative border), and three bedroom closets (all walls and ceilings).

Stripped wall paint in living room, main hallway, one bedroom, and entry hall.

This was not a project we planned on, but then the paint started peeling around where we'd pulled molly bolts out of the walls (argh, grumble)...and kept going.

Tore up asbestos tiles (two layers!) in utility room. The tiles were damaged when we pulled up the area rug, which was fused to the floor due to what I believe to be a diabolical combination of dog and/or cat piss with the backing on the rug. I ripped up about a quarter of the room before realizing that the size of the tiles appeared to be about 9 inches square...which, combined with the age of the house, indicated asbestos tile. We sent some off to be tested and, sure enough, it was. The best part of this mess is that the black mastic in there does NOT contain asbestos.

I finished the rest of the project in gawd-awful, sweltering PPE. (The asbestos abatement people wanted $1400 to do the job. Like, no. Now we just have to pay them to haul it away.) The room's now been scrubbed and mopped thoroughly. I don't think they ever cleaned in there. One of my odder discoveries was unpopped corn kernels in the dryer vent tube. What the...? Part of the wall in there is damaged (looks like drywall or something) and was falling apart when I was pulling out the baseboards.

Removed ghastly, murderous grass plant from front yard. I also removed a lot of poison ivy from the backyard, but it was the grass plant that actually caused me grief and injury. Before M trimmed it (it attacked him, too) it was taller than the house. It weighed more than I do, so after I finally dug deep enough around and under it and pushed it, bodily, from the hole, I was unable to haul it back to our yard pile

Rented a skip to dispose of as much of the POs' stuff as possible. They didn't finish packing and moving even though they were given three extra days past settlement to do so. So they left furniture, tools, trash, a dirty cat litter box, a TV in the yard, etc. We filled the skip to the top without even starting on the attic.

Cleaned the hell out of the concrete slab multiple times with various cleaners. Had someone fill the cracks (living room, master bedroom, kitchen, dining room, hallway). Discovered via cleaning that part (just part!) of the concrete in the 'foyer' is painted! It was so filthy before you couldn't tell.

Prepped, primed and finished painting one bedroom (except for trim). Prepped and primed master bedroom. Filled holes in other walls... so many holes... There are still more.

Stripped faux popcorn crap off kitchen ceiling. Unhappily, this was one of those 'and then you discover something ELSE wrong' projects.

Sprayed windows and doors with Orange Guard, a natural ant killer/repellent. Got ladybugs to take care of aphids.

Took out ancient, mouldering air conditioner, located storm window (in shed!), removed spider from said window, put window back where it belongs.

Had electric mess fixed (grounded sockets installed, wiring corrected, wire to nowhere in living room repaired...) by M's friend.

Put in new dining room light. The old one had a broken socket with live wire sticking out AND was so low you could walk into it