Not too much of an update, but I just couldn’t believe how pretty everything is. I wish we’d been about to get everything trimmed back already. Damn slow moving tax refund.
The yard is blooming!
Mar 28
The yard work continues:
Mar 21
The work continues on getting the beds cleared. The upper beds were easy-ish for me to get cleaned out, but now that we are working the lower beds near the house I have started to take the ‘throw some money at it’ approach. I love this approach, sadly my wallet does not.
But it’s starting to look great, hopefully next week I get the bark and start laying it down.
There are a lot of flowers in the yard, it’s nice when the gardener does the clearing cause she actually recognizes the stuff that is already here, breaks it up, spreads it around. It makes me feel really plant-ignorant but I guess no ones starts out as an expert gardener.
Things are starting to bloom in the yard, the magnolia tree is this riot of color. It’s just beautiful.
I am still a little shocked sometimes that this is all ours.
Yard Work
Feb 24
So long time no post from me and all that. Yeah yeah yeah, I know.
The bathroom is still tantalizingly incomplete. I bought window and door casings from Second Use and cut them to size, but now they’re sitting in my basement unsanded, unprimed, unpainted, and uninstalled. And of course I still haven’t done anything about the tub/shower valve escutcheon, although I did fix the broken screw in the shower arm drop-ear, so it’s solid again.
The main point of this update is the most recent bit of yard work Jen and I did last weekend. It’s been unseasonally good weather the last week or so (it stopped today, naturally), so first Jen got out and raked up all the leaves, sticks, and dead morning glory from the side yard.
As it turns out, there’s actually a brick patio underneath all of it, not just a bit.
Typically for this house and yard, whichever previous owner installed it installed it wrong — there’s no base of gravel and compacted sand, no! They just laid down bricks over black plastic directly onto the dirt, so of course it’s all wavy and uneven. Sigh.
But: since I’m pretty sure the bricks are pavers and not wall bricks, we’ll be able to save them and use them for our own patio to be overlaid over the existing concrete patio directly behind the house. Someday. Yay!
As you can see by the photos, there’s also a pond — we knew it was there but didn’t realize it was about 30 inches deep. Apparently there was supposed to be an upper pond with a stream and a waterfall leading to the lower pond. I’m sure a shrubbery was involved somehow. In any case, it’s going to be siphoned out and removed and eventually appear on a Craigslist advertisement.
So: last weekend we acquired a lawn mower from a friend’s shed where it had been sitting idle for at least three years. A $50 trip to a local lawnmower repair guy later, I was able to mow the entire front lawn for the first time in five months. As you can see, the entry looks a lot nicer when it doesn’t look like a jungle:
The mower doesn’t have drive wheels like the mowers I used to use as a teenager, but at least our yard is almost entirely flat.
I would have continued mowing and done the back yard, but since there were huge piles of yard waste covering parts of it I figured I’d take care of those first. The largest pile under the trees was mostly leaves and sticks and not so much morning glory. I filled up the 40-gallon yard waste bin plus nine big Home Depot bags:
You can see more or less where the pile was — everything in the area from the leftmost tree to the fence to the concrete driveway was a foot and a half or more deep in crap:
Meanwhile, Jen completed (or nearly so) work on the front garden beds, which are going to look very nice when they’re planted with flowers in the spring:
Sadly, the end of the great yard cleaning is still pretty far off. Not only do the piles of dead morning glory in the first picture remain, but in the raised area at the southeast corner is this:
We’re kinda scared to poke about in this treacherous pile of junk, construction debris, tree branches, weeds, and rocks to even determine how bad it is. And there’s another similar pile on the other side of the garden shed. When the clerk at Home Depot saw me buying twenty yard waste bags, he commented, “Those are pretty big, you know.” To which I could only reply, “Oh, believe me, I’ll be back for more…”
Finally, since it was such a nice day and both Jen and I were working outside, we brought Thekla out to play, which led to lots of hysterical crying. Turns out she’s terrified of grass.
Yard improvements:
Feb 7
So the never ending bathroom slog marches on. We are so close to done, but not. There are a couple of repairs from things going in badly, some mismatches when new parts went in. Trim we had hoped to repaint and put back up was so brittle it just wasn’t worth putting back up. And the money was gone so anything that had to be bought just had to wait.
I’ve been thinking about the yard, and just decided to start with the front yard as it was less disheartening than the back. The back just makes me want pull my hair out So I’ve discovered that at some point someone really loved this yard. There are garden strips and I am seeing a bunch of bulbs sprouting. It’s just been horribly neglected for a really long time.
So first I discovered a cement edging under the moss, grass and debris. It took a good long while just to get it uncovered.
Then in the beds I’ve started pulling out all the weeds and garbage that has just been left in them over the last couple years. It’s a long slow process..
Of course the undone portion just sits and mocks me..
I ended up with quite the rubbish pile, even after filling the entire yard waste bin.
All and all I would have to admit it’s not lookin’ half bad.
I am so sick of working on this bathroom. Rather, I’m so sick of working on this bathroom and having one stupid thing after another break or go wrong, or just be poorly designed (or have the instructions not match the equipment).
But before I start ranting, here’s the progress so far (and there really has been a lot of progress, just a whole hell of a lot slower than I wanted):
Tile
The tile is done. Well, all but done. It’s all on the walls and floor, and it’s all grouted. The wall tile is Rittenhouse Square 3×6 in white with black accent tiles, and the floor tile is Octagon & Dot, both from Dal-Tile. Grout is Polyblend Delorean Gray, sanded on the floor and unsanded on the walls.
The wall grout was difficult and it’s not as clean as I’d hoped, because I only had just enough grout so I was trying to conserve it, and then I ran out of time toward the end and tried to basically do the entire shower at once, which meant that it had started setting up by the time I got around to sponging the excess off. And wiping, wiping, wiping on a vertical surface was very hard on my arms and back.
The floor grout was a lot easier. Granted, there was only about a third as much floor square footage as wall square footage, but the joints being bigger and the whole thing being horizontal made it a lot easier. I only used about a third of the 25 pound bag, but since I didn’t know better I mixed up the whole thing — which is now completely set up in the bucket; I used a plastic bucket that cat litter came in because I intended it to be disposable.
We haz tile
Paint
Jen presciently bought us a Wagner Paint Crew airless sprayer and a roller arm accessory. It took me a while to figure out how to set it up, and the first coat of primer went on pretty slowly. After that, however, the second coat of primer and two coats of paint only took half an hour each. We used Sherwin-Williams Bath Paint, and I have about a quarter gallon left to use on the window and door trim. Sherwin-Williams says the stuff is self-priming, but I don’t believe them. It took two coats to really cover and get out all the thin spots. On the other hand, it went on really well, and I think it was a good value despite being $40 a gallon. The only downside is that it’s so white (I didn’t have them tint it at all) it makes the white tile look off-white. 🙂
We haz paint
Shower Valve
And now we come to the clusterf*** portion of the program.
We got the Premier Torino shower/valve/faucet set (and the matching sink faucet). It’s pretty, but in retrospect I wish I’d looked at a model in person instead of just ordering it off the internet — turning the handle adjusts both temperature and pressure simultaneously, so there’s no way to have a lukewarm trickle; a quarter turn from off is both half and half hot and cold and maximum flow. I’d have preferred the type where turning it adjusts the temperature and pulling it adjusts the pressure.
Anyway, there’s a brass bolt with a threaded hole through the center sticking out from the valve that the handle attaches to. Apparently in order to adjust for different valves, wall thicknesses, etc., it’s overly long and you’re supposed to cut it back to the proper length.
Here’s the problem: there’s a brass adapter that screws into the bolt with a knurled knob on the end; the handle fits onto that with a locking screw to hold it on. So I measured and marked where to cut the bolt to have the adapter sticking out far enough to have the handle sit flush with the escutcheon. No problem. But then I cut it, screwed the escutcheon on over it, and then discovered that there’s a piece molded into the top of the escutcheon that blocks the adapter from going in far enough.
So in other words, it’s impossible to have the handle flush with the top of the escutcheon. Now, the instructions are less than clear: the parts list shows the adapter and locking screw, but the assembly instructions show a screw going through the handle and into the bolt with no adapter. I wonder if I have the adapter, handle and locking screw from the newer model but the escutcheon from the older model.
Right now I have it entirely assembled sans escutcheon, so it works but looks kinda ugly. And I get to have the I’m sure wonderfully pleasant experience of calling their customer service and attempting to explain all this over the phone and ordering at least one new part. Grrr.
Oh, and I almost forgot: I was screwing the shower head arm back into the drop-ear elbow inside the wall. The “tight” spot had the arm at a 45° angle past vertical, so I could back it off 45° or push on almost another whole turn. I looked at the threads and it wasn’t really threaded very far, so I went ahead and cranked it. I got about halfway when the goddam drop-ear broke inside the wall. Or at least something broke; I’m hoping it was just the screws and not the brass fitting. Regardless, I’m going to have to cut open the wall, fix or replace it, and patch and paint. Grr raar raar raar.
Fixtures
The shower curtain rod went up easily, since I’ve already put it up temporarily and taken it down again, um, five times now I think. It’s a double curved curtain rod from Bed Bath & Beyond — I like having the curved rod since I really dislike brushing up against a damp plasticky curtain liner while showering.
We haz a shower curtain rod
The medicine cabinet was easy, as were the sconce lights. The overhead light was more difficult, since somewhere along the line it didn’t quite get set proud of the joists by quite enough, so the bolts hanging down from the box to screw the base onto weren’t long enough. A trip to the hardware store later (the next day) it went up just fine. Note to self, however: leave a longer wire to attach to. Last, there was again something wrong with the fan blocking and it wants to droop down a quarter inch or so from the ceiling, which means I have to climb up into the attic and figure out how to attach it better. Bah.
Medicine cabinet & sconces are in
Light and fan are in
Another annoying issue — chalk yet another thing up to inexperience — is the wall sockets. Those little spacer nubs on plastic electrical boxes that are supposed to leave the top of the box flush with the installed drywall? They lie. All my boxes are recessed about 3/16″. Not fatal — I can unscrew them and put in longer screws and spacing washers. But the other thing I didn’t know is that you have to cut the hole in the drywall exactly the size of the box, or at least no more than 1/8″ larger. The snap-on Decora plates need to brace against the drywall, and I’ve got too much of a gap. I’ll need to get out the patching compound that dries hard as rock and fill in around the boxes, and then paint the compound, and only then attach the switch/socket plates. Dammit.
Toilet
We got the American Standard Champion 4 from Home Depot. Installation was pretty easy, except for the feed valve, which just did not want to go onto the copper stubout. Eventually I’d damaged the brass compression fitting enough that I just threw that valve away and went with another one. A whole lot of vice grip + pliers action later, it was watertight. That was yesterday at 1:00am.
Toilet installed
Look! It flushes!
My sophisticated leak detection device
Sink
Clusterf*** part II. We got a pedestal sink off Craigslist from a guy up in Marysville with two warehouses full of … stuff. It’s fairly nice looking and we paid way less than retail because it apparently got dropped in the box and the top of the pedestal was broken. I was able to superglue it all back together and reinforce it with fiberglass tape and adhesive, so I didn’t think there would be any problem.
Until I got both pieces out of the box and put together in good light. At which point I realized that not only were they not quite the same color (white/off-white), but the top of the pedestal doesn’t actually fit into the groove at the bottom of the sink — they’re different models.
Okay. Fine. The pedestal isn’t really important in that it as long as it’s supporting its share of the weight it doesn’t need to be perfectly mated to the sink, and sometime next year when we have more money we’ll just get a new damn sink. So I put them up against the wall and spent an hour getting the assembly perfectly positioned and leveled and the screw holes marked.
My brand new carbide bit that I used to drill the holes for the toilet flange yesterday no longer wanted to drill through tile at all, so I made a late night run to Home Depot and found a set of tile and glass drill bits that I swear they didn’t have when I was looking for them weeks ago. I certainly wish I’d had them before, since they cut through the tile like buttah.
Hooray, right? Well, I put my wood bit into my drill to complete the pilot holes for the wall mounting screws and when it punched right through into air discovered that I’d made a fundamental error. I’d never seen a pedestal sink unattached to a wall before, so months ago I looked at the big holes in the middle of the back and thought that’s where you put in lag bolts with big washers or whatever. I was wrong, as I discovered when I watched a pedestal sink installation video online.
Here, I’ll let the pictures tell the story:
So since at this point I can’t go in through the back of the wall and put in more blocking, I’m going to have to cobble up some lag bolt solution after all — tomorrow.
Punch List
- Get some more grout and fill in all the little gaps, in corners and just where I missed a bit.
- Call the shower valve company and get some new parts
- Scrape and clean all the excess grout, paint, and joint compound off the tile
- Silicone all the tile/drywall joints and around the tub
- Put up the @#$%*&! sink
- Fill in around the switch and socket boxes
- Clean, paint, and reinstall the door and window casings
- Fix the fan blocking
- Insulate the ceiling
Jen keeps telling me what a good job of everything I’m doing, but I’ve been so frustrated by stupid shit going wrong that all I can see is the imperfections. This project started out as hard work but fun and interesting. It’s not fun anymore. I have two days to finish the last couple of crucial items before we have people over for Thanksgiving, and then presumably complete the rest over the long weekend.
Then I want to not think about projects for a while. The rest of this house had better not be this stressful.
We wanted to get the chimney and the fireplace checked so that we could have a fire while we had guests over this Thanksgiving. Plus with last years snowpocolypse I wanted us to be able to have an additional means to heat the house. So we hire professional to check things out and it appears everything is a little off. Story of our life right..? I chat with the chimney guy after he’s done his preliminary inspection. It involved a lot of.. “Wow I haven’t seen that before” “I’m not quite sure what they placed that vent there for..” “One of your chimney’s is fairly standard but the other one…”
I mention our blog and the fact that we have a ‘what the fuck’ category and they first thing he said was “you must use it a lot.”
Gee thanks buddy. Why not just rub it in?
The assistant just popped his head in and asked, “So there’s this wire tied around the chimney with a screw driver and a shoe tied to it, you want those taken down?” “Yes… yes please take it down..” I feel like I should hang my head in shame but hell?!? it wasn’t me who decided to create a my own ahht piece involving a chimney, some wire, a shoe and a screw driver? I mean who does that?
We agreed when we got the house that we would host the annual orphans and friends Thanksgiving, with the addendum ‘if we have a working bathroom’ ha ha ha. Well the ha ha ha became a little less ‘ha ha’ and a little more ‘oh shit.. really?? seriously?? It’s not done yet??’ Well I ‘broke in’ our working upstairs wonderful beautiful brand new toilet this morning and hopefully tonight the sink will go in. One way or another Thanksgiving is happening, though there may be some unfinished bits.
This weekend my friend watched the baby while I cleaned the house in preparation for the descending hungry hordes. I am amazed out house actually looks really great, it looks like a responsible grown up person lives here.
Of course if anyone went into the basement, they could potentially be crushed under the toppling of badly stacked boxes of crap.
Today I work from home because we are having the chimney cleaned and some repairs done to it and the fireplaces themselves. Time to get back to work since lunch is about over. Though I am being distracted by A Chorus Line. I’ve had the songs stuck in my head since watching the documentary about it, Every Little Step, which was absolutely fantastic. I had to pull out my old VHS tape, I blew off the dust and stuck it VCR. I’m surprised the darn thing still plays and I didn’t wear it out in my teens. I get to relive my teenage crush on Terrence Mann and listen for my favorite line of ‘Why is it only my ass that ever gets invited places?’
The Baby Gate
Since we have a little one who will be bipedal any day now yeesh, Jen’s been after me to put up a baby gate at the top of the stairs. The instructions said it needs to be installed into a solid if not structural elements, which presented a problem. The staircase has sidewalls, but they have about three 2×4 studs each — you can wiggle them about an inch either way without even needing any effort — so I couldn’t install the gate into the obvious opening. There are structural columns at the top of the stairs which are in place of the original outer wall of the gable cottage but which now form one of two arches from the addition on either side of the fireplace — one into the stairwell and the other into the living room. But they’re too far apart for the gate.
So I built extensions, I guess you could call them, that anchor into the columns and make the opening narrow enough for the gate to fit. They’re not particularly pretty (I learn a lesson about carpentry every time I pick up a power tool: in this case, don’t try to drill a perfectly perpendicular hole without one of those mini-drill presses you attach to your drill), but at least instead of having bare ends of 4×4 posts sticking up I covered them with little fence post caps.
And, since they don’t meet the stair sidewalls or the fireplace, the cats can get around them but even a bipedal baby can’t:
So it’s nice to have one project completely done with and checked off the list.
The Bathroom
I got the floor down a couple of weeks ago, but it’s just been sitting there mocking me ever since.
As you can see in the photos, it’s an octagon-and-dot mosaic tile, and I really should have used a smaller-notch trowel. Pretty much every joint has thinset squidged up into it. That is to say, every one of the thousands and thousands of little tiny joints has thinset squidged up into it, some halfway, some to the top. Scraping them out with a utility knife is going to take forever.
I’ve been working slowly on finishing the drywall — it’s not that it’s particularly difficult, it’s just the first time I’ve done it so I’m figuring out my technique as I go along. But the bathroom absolutely must without fail be all the way done by Thanksgiving, so I took the day off work today to get as much done as possible. I spent the morning doing second-coat on the drywall, and then Jen called and said she was taking a half day and would be home to help.
So we decided to attack the walls. I mixed up a bunch of thinset, set up the borrowed laser level along the reference lines I’d already marked, and then Jen went to town setting all the field tile while I worked on making all the odd cuts and fits. The result: we have walls!
There are two reasons we didn’t completely finish: I can’t do the ends of the shower walls because the end-bullnose tiles are on order, and I can’t do the top row of tiles until I’ve skim-coated the drywall (since there will be a bit of overlap). The bottom row of black tiles is just going to be an evening of cutting and fitting, and we were both tired after working all day, so that’ll have to be another post for another day.
And here’s why my wife is awesome: not only did she do almost all of the work to get the tile up, she actually got it up a lot faster than I would have done. If she hadn’t taken a half day off, I’d probably have gotten one wall done and maybe two, instead of all of them. And that doesn’t even mention all the work on the rest of the house she’s been doing while I’ve been putting all my energy into one room. The fact that this place looks like a home instead of a box and tool storage facility is all due to her.
Update:
So you’ll remember the missing drain hole for the sink. I’m happy to say that it was pretty easy going in through the linen closet, since it was faced in particle board, not the 3/4″ tongue-and-groove of the bedroom closet, and my measurements were pretty darn close:
(Yes, I’m aware that it’s not centered. The sink, shelf, and medicine cabinet aren’t centered on the old pre-existing drain line, mostly because of having to mount both sconce lights into studs and find a center point between them.)
Now I have to figure out the best way to interface between the 1-1/2″ ABS and the 1-1/4″ standard sink drain and P-trap. I guess the trap escutcheon is going to have to cover a lot.
Oh, and here’s a photo I forgot to put up months ago.
Moral: don’t try to pull eighty-year-old framing nails out of eighty-year-old wood with a little bitty finishing hammer.
Don’t get me started.
Our agent called last Wednesday to tell us that she had forwarded the last set of photos to the underwriters, and they wanted two things: a photo of the area where the rubbish pile was from the same vantage point so they could see it was the same area; and a coat of protective sealant on the garage door. When I asked what the hell “a coat of protective sealant” meant, she said “a coat of paint.”
That is to say, just to repeat myself: the garage is rotting and will be racing us to see whether it can fall over before we can get around to demolishing it, and they’re worried about a freaking coat of paint on the cheap-ass door.
So fine, I used up the remnants of three bottles of Rustoleum white spray paint and put a @#$%ing coat of paint on the garage door, and took another photo of where the rubbish pile was, which I forwarded on.
The kicker is that on Saturday we got a letter postmarked last Wednesday (the same time our agent was forwarding their new requirements) saying that for failure to fix their conditions they were canceling our policy as of December, and a refund check for the rest of the premium.
Yesterday I called our agent, saying, basically, “WTF? I mean, WTFingF?” She was very apologetic, she had no idea the cancellation letter had gone out, and she would immediately get on the phone with them and make sure our policy was going to continue, and that we could shred the check.
Hopefully, that’s the last we have to worry about this, but I’m not holding my breath.
I guess the moral of the story is don’t buy a fixer-upper. Sheesh.
I have pretty much had to come to the conclusion that next year the yard is going to be a little ugly. Things are having to be ripped back to bare bones so that some order can be brought to the chaos. It’s really frustrating, I want to have a groomed, attractive yard and garden, but the ‘planning’ portion is terrifying. I haven’t ever done any landscaping or planning to this extent. I worry that it’s going to end up being really amateur and clunky.
So far we have clipped back the rhododendron and the lilacs that were horribly overgrown. Underneath we discovered dahlias and a bunch of other flowering plants that I don’t remember the names of right now. And a brick edging is going to take me a while to fully uncover. I’ve ripped out some ‘squirrel trees’ and trimmed back the roses.
I still keep going back and forth on whether I want raised beds or not for my garden next year.
So some of the work so far..
From
To
I’ve been putting in bark, it’s going to be a long process. But i just have to keep reminding myself it’s a long term project.