1921 Bungalow

Fire, dirt and Rabbit Holes

2007-10-25T21:41:00.001-07:00

Update coming soon - we've had fun with fires, levelling the back yard and completely stripping the interior of the back of the house. Time to start the blog up again methinks .............

Holy Levitating Tree Batman!

2007-04-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

What’s going on here then?
When we bought the house it had two ficus trees planted out the front. Both were shaped very nicely into a “lollipop” style that did absolutely nothing for the house. There only redeeming feature was that they hid the house from the street. It was yellow after all.

Once we removed the paint from the brick and had the house painted it was time to remove the trees. Perry, Todd and Nate from “Palm Tree Cut” came over and made short work of them…..

Crane Truck:

Chopping tree off at ground height

Free

Airborne:

Bye Bye Tree:

Now that the trees are gone the front of the house has a lot more exposure…..

Gratuitous shot of my new toy:

Progress

2007-04-09T21:57:00.000-07:00

Figured we should post an update. The Living room and dining room are basically done. Both rooms have been stripped to the studs, rewired and insulated and then received new floors, walls and ceilings.

The China Buffet was a salvage find.

AK has been wanting to learn the piano for a while. We looked around and found a 1908 Melville Clark Player piano. The player mechanism is toast, but after a cash infusion the piano is playable and sounding good.

Here is a reminder of what we started with.
Dining Room:

Living Room:

China Buffet:

The china buffet will eventually recess fully into the wall. Currently the other side of the wall is supporting our kitchen cabinets. We’ll leave the buffet as a free standing unit until we redo the kitchen.

You may have noticed the “toy” cars sitting on the buffet. They’re models from the 40’s and 50’s called tether cars – the precursor for today’s slot cars and radio control models. Here is a closer view of a 1940’s Dooling “Frog”. The small motor in front is a 40’s era .60cu in Hornet.

I’m not sure what it is, but I really do like these. I first came across them a couple of years ago and now try and keep an eye out for them whenever I’m at a swap meet.

Shed Demo

2007-04-08T22:21:00.000-07:00

Shed Demo
We have too many sheds in the back yard. In spite of having too much stuff, and not enough storage space, we decided to demo this shed.

It’s the oldest of the three, leaks, and we’re eventually going to build a garage here so it won’t be a major loss.

Ryan came by to give us a hand. Gotta love the Sawzall…

Bye Bye shed.

August come and gone

2006-09-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

Hi all

Well, the last month we’ve been a hive of activity over here at Casa de Kerr. And we have pictures to prove it!

There is the new car, of course. That was about a month ago now but it took two weeks to get all the work finished up on it. We got a 2005 Mini Cooper S, and PK wanted all the boy racer bits added in, so we got the John Cooper Works kit installed. It also started out with a white top, with white mirror caps. Not being big on eggs, I wanted the top and mirrors painted black. We also had black racing stripes installed on the bonnet and boot. Lovely! It’s not great on mileage now that it has 220 horsepower, but that little noise it makes as the air filter kicks in at 4,000 RPM – awesome! (Apparently that little noise is the sound that the engine makes as it gulps down money.)

We also finally got the house painted. No more nasty yellow house! We are now the more stately Craftsman colors of green, brown and red. Alright, so the red is a little bright but it’s still better than that yellow. We are thinking about taking the red down a notch or two as it’s very full on. Not sure. Comments welcome.

The painting crew, Meyer Painting and Contracting, were amazing. They took 9 days to prepare, prime and paint the house. It would have taken us months. And they did a fantastic job – the outside of the house is tidier than when they started (I mean the yard, not just the paint job). I keep coming home and thinking “this can’t be our house!” Too cool!

1st coat of primer – still stripping the paint from the chimney:

New Paint:

We also bought a new old stove from a friend. It’s probably from the 1940’s or 50’s but definitely feels better than our old gas range. It’s a Wedgewood and runs great. PK managed to light the pilots without blowing the house up, but we did have a pervading smell of gas that was mystifying. Our lovely neighbor Abby was over for a visit and showed us that there was yet another pilot light for the oven (we have an oven and a broiler or roasting oven). Sure enough, it wasn’t lit so that was fun. Good thing the gas didn’t build up or we’d have a nice little explosion in the kitchen. Of course, the cats were still alive so that was a good sign – they can act like our canaries in the mines.

With the house looking so good from the outside, we got all fired up and decided to go buy some new furniture for the living and dining rooms. We needed a coffee table, a dining table and chairs and something to store all our mountains of DVDs. Fifteen hundred dollars later we had a new coffee table, dining table and benches and we’ve got a rain check on the DVD cabinet. Oh the joys of credit in America – we got it all on a store credit card with no interest and no payments for 6 months. Of course, if you don’t pay it all up in that 6 months they will ding you with the compounded interest as soon as you get to 6 months and one day. No wonder people over here have credit issues.

PK has been working on running cabling for the multi-media cabinet. He also managed to give himself a black eye in the process (darn those pesky drills that slip and punch you!) Wish I’d taken a photo to show you, it was fairly impressive. I’ve been telling everyone I did it. He can fill you in on the other stuff he has been doing, like framing the doors in the living room, stripping the paint off the chimney, installing new locks on the front door and having various things stained.

It’s Labor weekend and the weather has been stinking hot. This is supposed to be the official end of Summer but I think someone forgot to tell her that. Seriously, it’s been hot since bloody May, can we just get on to Autumn already? Bring on Halloween, that’s my favorite time of year.

Oooh, and if anyone wants to buy a 91 Mazda Miata, convertible, red (goes faster!), automatic then drop us a line. It was my daily transport vehicle and it goes well. It’s up for $2500.00 but we’re flexible.

Flooring is hard and dirty work

2006-05-30T21:57:00.000-07:00

Flooring is hard work. I honestly though that three days over the memorial weekend would be enough to get the floor down. I’d already pulled up all the old boards, so all we had to do was repair the termite damaged sub floor and lay the oak.

The sub floor was worse then I’d expected – although not as bad as it could have been. When I first started pulling up the old fir, it looked as though most of the sub floor had been chewed up. I honestly though I was going to have to replace the whole lot – although that may have worked out faster. In the end we had to replace about 240 linear ft of the 1*6. I’d arranged for a friend of mine to come over and help and even with the two of us it still took Saturday and Sunday to get the repairs done.

Here’s the dining room after repair:

And looking towards the living room:

Most of the corner under the pile of floor boards was replaced. You can tell the new boards by their color.

The three tenets of a good builder are Plumb, Level and Square. Level is a bit much to hope for in a 90 year old house, so we settled for flat. Monday morning saw us crawling around the floor with a straight edge checking that variances didn’t exceed an 1/8th inch over 6ft. We got lucky.

Next up was laying roofing paper to absorb the squeaks and any minor variances.

We decided on a double width for the transition between the main run and the fireplace hearth. The rooms are long and narrow, so the boards have to run long ways or else you end up with the “ladder” effect. The transition breaks the line of the boards running to the hearth, and defines the border between the floor and the hearth

Here’s the first board laid down. You can also see the chalk reference lines

I don’t have a picture of it, but the next step was to run two long runs of boards from the hearth to the window seat in the dining room. These runs are “groove to groove” with a slip tongue joining them. This allows the floor boards to run in two opposite directions which will make things a lot easier once we get to the columns.

By this point it was about 3:00pm on Monday afternoon.

This is where we got to at 9:00pm Monday:

The two “back to back” runs are on the left. Things definitely progressed faster once we had everything snapped out and were just laying the boards. In case you’re wondering, the string hanging from the dining room light fixture is to help us avoid the pointy bit. Its hard to avoid obstacles above you when your attention is focused on the floor.

Here are a couple of better photos taken this morning:

I really like the color of the floor. Its almost a shame that we have to refinish it.

I’ve still got to post pictures of the shed. Hopefully this weekend.

Memorial Weekend (or the weekend to forget?)

2006-05-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

After slogging through nearly a years worth of updates on my favorite house blog, I felt inspired to update ours. Either that or guilted into it. Yeah, that's more like it.

PK spent last weekend pulling out the old floor boards in the two front rooms, the living and dining rooms. We had ummed and ahhed about replacing it, but there were a number of factors that settled it for us.

When we pulled up the 12 inch ceramic tiles and plywood sheeting that a PO had installed, we found that the doug fir floor wasn't in as good a condition as we'd hoped. There were areas of termite damage that made parts of it dangerous to walk on. We weren't even sure the floor had been fully uncovered from when the house was built, as the grade of the wood wasn't fantastic. It had definitely been stained in the past, but for a large amount of time it seemed to have been covered with area rugs and then carpet (and then our wonderful tile).

The floor has been exposed for about a year now, and we haven't treated it with any kindness. It's had a lathe and plaster ceiling pulled down on it, paint and plaster dropped on it, and a fair share of cat pee and poop dropped on it too.

Here's the floor in it's "au naturel" state. Note one of the two pee and poop machines resting on the mantel. Your time will come, evil one.

When PK started pulling it up last weekend we realised we'd made the right decision. The wood was shot - it was difficult to get any boards up in one piece, as they kept splintering like cardboard. Many of the boards had been face nailed at some point by over zealous carpet installers (or anyone attempting to fix a squeak) which would have been a real bitch when it came to sanding and polishing.

Here's a shot of a particularly bad board.

PK managed to get a number of intact boards out which we will use to repair any further boards in the rest of the house. Based on the state of these boards we're thinking that carpet may be the way to go for the other rooms. If the boards are all crap we don't want to have to replace them - too expensive. As much as I'd love a fully wooden floored house, it won't be this one.

This weekend sees our intrepid workers installing our new/old oak flooring in the living and dining room. All that nail pulling is finally going to pay off. PK and our new found contractor Ryan are currently in the process of repairing the termite eaten boards in the sub floor, which has taken the better part of two days.

There's also a large underfloor gas heater that needed to be disconnected and covered up. It's cemented to the foundation so we won't be moving it anytime soon. Hell, who's to say that in 50 years time another overzealous home "restornovator" won't crack open the subfloor and curse us out for covering up such a post modern convienience? Stranger things have happened. In the mean time, we will cover it with sub floor and oak flooring and let them worry about it.

I'll post more later with (hopefully) laid floor boards! Yay!

P.S. In case you're wondering, we had Terminex come out and treat the house for subterranean termites. They have been coming out to spray our yard for the last 12 months (since the cucaracha and fleas incident) so we thought we'd use them for the termite issue. They did a great job, but be warned - they had to drill holes all around the perimeter of the house at 12 inch intervals to drop the poison in.

PK was home when they did it, and was most "surprized" to come round the front of the house to find them drilling holes into the porch where it meets the house. It doesn't look too bad, and faced with the alternative of termites I'll take the drill, but it did give us a shock. If we'd known that was what they would do, we would have looked into other methods. Just goes to show, make sure you know what someone is intending to do when they quote a job.

Period appropriate capital S-hed

2006-05-15T21:24:00.000-07:00

I wrote this one evening a couple of weeks ago, after a too large glass of wine, but thought you might enjoy it anyway. The pics are still coming, dammit.

Hey, it's only May. Give us a break. What do you think we are - The Devil Queen?

Seriously though folks, I was outta town for a month there in April. Yes, I managed to wrangle a week of work in New Zealand, followed by two weeks vacation with family and friends. Lovely to see everyone down there, but also nice to come (dare I say it?) home again.

The house is coming along. The last time we left you, PK was building a Shed. With a capital S. It's probably THE most period appropriate Shed I've ever seen. Exposed rafter tails. Knee joints - whatever those are! Even it's own little dinky "stacking" door so we can load floor boards straight into the - errr - loading area without having to - I don't know - open the main hanger doors?

This Shed took a fair amount of time to construct, with no small help from friends (thanks friends!) Upon my arrival back in the States, (and after my two day bout of stomach flu) I was filled with the milk of human kindness. Must have been all those grapes I ate while I was poorly. I figured PK had spent enough of his hard earned time (and money) on this Shed and it was about time I put a bit of effort in. So I volunteered to paint it. Not with colored paint mind you - I wasn't that silly to commit to a whole project (we did only paint our living and dining rooms a few months ago, so the memory of that hellish Thanksgiving weekend is still fresh.)

No, I volunteered for the "easy" job of priming the confernal structure. Easy peasy I thought - I'll have two coats on there in no time. PK suggested we borrow a friends paint sprayer, but I declined - how hard could this be? (Has my memory really gotten this bad?)

Little did I realise what the downside to "period appropriate" was. It means lots of additional little wooden bits to paint - rafters, palings, the gaps between palings and doors (but not hinges).

Needless to say, I got one coat on last weekend without getting into the gaps between the "boards" in the siding before calling it quits. The paint sprayer arrives next weekend. Bring it on I say. (Pictures to follow. I promise.)

This weekend just gone we had fun and good times removing nails from floor boards. The nice part about this (no, really) is that instead of just me having a bitchingly sore arm and hand, I have a sore hand, while PK has a sore arm. This was because we decided to tag team the nail removal instead of just having one person do it (alright, so last time PK may have been tearing out the floorboards with a WonderBar and his bare hands while I removed the nails, but let's not get bogged down in details.)

I believe we have effectively proven that Kyptonite is indeed not the hardest substance known to man - 95 year old oak floor boards are. They DO NOT want to relinquish their hold on their beloved little 3 inch nails. We have tried everything - talking rationally, cajoling, crying, nay even an intervention did not convince them they were better off without their little metallic friends. So we had to resort to brute force. And it wasn't pretty. I can't help but think of nail pullers as a torture device, and I'm still not sure it wasn't us being tortured. Half the boards down, half to go.

I'll get some pics soon, honest.

Made out like bandits

2006-03-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

I’ve given up expressing surprise at the intervals between blog postings. I sit each day and read all the interesting updates at www.houseblogs.net and yet I can’t seem to get motivated to update our own blog. Oh well.

The last three weeks have been pretty good, house wise. We attended a salvage sale in Santa Ana and picked up a nice buffet for $150. It fills the hole nicely where a previous owner pulled out our buffet in the dining room.

It has all the original hardware and even has a butler’s pass through where you can open the panel at the back and pass plates back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room. I can just see how PK and I will amuse ourselves with that once it gets installed. Good thing we don’t have a dumb waiter or we would have fixed it up and used it as an impromptu elevator. Anyway ……..

The same day as the salvage sale we went to a demolition/estate sale in West Covina. It was a beautiful 1911 bungalow on a huge 3 acre section that was being demolished to make way for 20 McMansions.

The house was around 2500 feet and was just gorgeous – all the original stained wood work, three sets of colonnades, a built in bookcase with glass doors, built in secretary with all the cool little pigeon holes, built in window seats, you name it – this place had it.

We decided to buy the swing door from the kitchen to the dining room as we needed one for our place.

I thought we were doing well to get out of there with so little, until PK and the Garner sisters came up with a dastardly plan. We would purchase the ENTIRE FLOOR so we could pull up the floor boards and use them at our respective restoration projects. Why, what an excellent idea! How about spending four days pulling oak floor boards out then removing nails from said oak floor boards until your hands are little claws and you can’t stand up straight?! Why, it isn’t enough that you spend two weekends on it – you should take a day off work too just to pull those little suckers up and bring them home. Bring it on!

Yes, we bought the floor. Yes, we spent four days pulling it out. Hell, we even bought all the built ins we could too. We are suckers for punishment. The whole time we were doing this I had such mixed emotions – anger that someone would want to pull this amazing house apart, frustration that we weren’t really working on our house at this time, indignation that the estate sale company only made $15K from ripping the house apart and despair that I would never have those four days of my life back again.

A lot of locals came through the house, and many expressed dismay to find it being dismantled. We were quick to explain that we were planning on using the pieces we were taking on our old house, and it would be used in a period appropriate way. Some people still looked at us like we were evil cretins for tearing it down. I thought about telling people we were from Habitat for Humanity but that would just be wrong (tempting though).

I don’t ever want to drive past that lot again. It breaks my heart to think of the house not being there any more. When we walked through it the first time I couldn’t help but think about how much cooler that house was than ours – it just had so much more character. Most of our house’s “features” were torn out as it was used as a rental – the West Covina house was intact in every way, even down to the hardware on the doors and windows. The kitchen had been renovated in the 60’s but apart from that – everything was as it was.

So we trucked the floorboards home and of course needed to find somewhere to store them. There’s no room at all in the house so we ended up renting a storage unit. Public storage have a “move in” special for $1 for the first month. Of course its $200 per month after that. All work on the house has stopped temporarily while PK builds a shed to a) put the floor boards in and b) put his tools in once the floors installed.

The shed will be in the back right corner of our lot. Its 10*12 and 8ft tall – which is as large as we can go without getting permits.

Mmmmmm. Yellow.

8ft siding on a 6ft 2” wall leaves 22” of skill saw fun on a ladder…..

Nearly done with the Dining room

2006-01-29T23:29:00.000-08:00

It’s been a busy month. Once the painting was out of the way, the next job was to re-hang the main boards for the “board and batten” wainscoting. I think it took me the better part of a week of evenings to get them back up. I’d get home from work at about 6:30 and work through to about 9:00. (I’ve been trying not to use power tools too much after 9:00pm) part of the whole “good neighbor” thing. The boards were previously nailed top and bottom. This time I used 1 ½ deck screws which were countersunk.

Once the wall surfaces were in place it was time for the trim. First up was the door to the kitchen:

This was completely rebuilt. The jam had had various hinge mortises cut into it and then refilled. We’re thinking of putting in a “double swinger”, as they had originally, so we didn’t want the mortises showing. I couldn’t get away with just filling them, because we’re staining this doorway, so a rebuild was the only option. I ended up breaking down the jamb, planning the backs of the verticals, replacing the top part of the jamb and re-assembling. I discovered, after taking this photo, that the sides are ¾ of an inch closer at the base then the top! Fortunately it was easy enough to fix. (Don’t mind the boxes in the doorway. We still have a few stashes of unpacked stuff).

Next up was the bay window:

Followed by the window seat:

We knew the house had originally had a window seat, in this bay window, because we’d seen the marks on the old wainscoting when we took the drywall off. You can also see the Cat 6 and Coax. I decided to put an outlet panel inside the window seat to keep it out of sight. We want all the benefits of technology – we just don’t want to see it.

Unfortunately I didn’t get any more progress photos. I spent about 10 days in the dining room doing the door and window casings, window seat and then running the base board, plate rail and picture rail. I subbed out the finish prep and stain, mainly because I don’t have the patience required, but also because we want to see this done. I used up the last of my vacation on the finish carpentry and the prep and finish was a fairly big job. It took Lee the better part of three weeks but I think the result speak for themselves.

The dining room hasn’t been this tidy in a long time. Don’t tell AK, but I took all stuff off the table and stuck it in the window seat.

I still have to attach the hinge properly and plane a little off the edge, but with 200lb of tools and other crap in it its working out just fine.

It’s funny how you never notice the background until it shows up in a photo. The living room is next.

Pretty much, all I have to do now is to clean up and hang the windows. Then its on to the living room.

Here’s a gratuitous flashback that I’ve been promising myself:

Hello Houseblogs.net

2005-12-28T22:27:00.000-08:00

Cool. We've just shown up on houseblogs.net. Hopefully this will motivate me to update the blog a bit more often. Probably not.

I decided to take the rest of the week off as vacation, trying to get the dining room finished. I'll get some pictures up later, but so far I've framed in the window seat, run baseboards and started the plate rail base. Things are starting to come together and look "almost" finished....

Progress at the front

2005-12-21T22:21:00.000-08:00

OK. So I suck at updating the blog. We’ve been getting plenty done, it just never seems quite finished enough to write about.

After priming the two front rooms in early November, we spent about two weeks trying to come up with colors. I really do understand why people paint their rooms white. It’s a whole lot easier. Colors that look really good on the paint chips are not so great when they’re covering 4 square ft of your dining room wall. Our plan was to try and pick some samples and “live” with them on the walls for the 2 weeks leading up to thanksgiving, at which point we’d paint. That was a good plan, except that everything we came up with either looked like poo or was just hideous.

Fortunately, one of our neighbors has a great eye for color and was able to help us out. Helen, we love you! We managed to make it through a week with the samples on the walls and no ill effects so it was time to buy some paint.

Between masking, the fact that we had three different colors for each room, and the fact that it was our first go at interior painting, it took us the better part of three days by the time we were done.

This is the dining room

And the living room

I’ll get some better/more pictures over the weekend. At the lower half of the dining room walls is the wainscoting, made of ¾ inch doug fir. This is the original stuff that we found under the drywall. Between the nail holes from the drywall, and the termite damage, they were pretty beaten up. This is part way through the clean up process

You can see where the baseboard was, and where the termites had been busy. The sandy residue over the rest of the board seems to be from insect tracks. The majority of the boards were in this condition.

The solution turned out to be pretty simple. I bought a planer and took an 1/8th of an inch of the top of the boards. The new walls, made from drywall with a plaster veneer, are slightly narrower then the old plaster – so everything works out.

We got the finish electric done (we added 19 outlets, switches and fixtures across the two rooms) which was an opportunity to hang the new light fixtures.

This is in the dining room

Its from the Torreon collection by Quoizel. I can’t get over how vibrant the colors are in this picture. AK really got a good photo here.

This is in the living room

It’s from the Dale Tiffany factory outlet just down the road from us. Half price, can’t argue with that.

I’ve just spent a ridiculous sum of money on doug fir battens, baseboard, plate rail etc to replace what had been ripped out. The big plan is to get that installed over Christmas with the hope of having these two rooms done by mid January.

Paint the town red

2005-11-14T20:09:00.000-08:00

First off, check out this post at The Devil Queen. Once again I thank our lucky stars we have such fantastic neighbors that actually support what we are doing with our house - I can't imagine how disheartening it must be to pour all your time, energy and money into your home, only to find out the neighbors are planning to take you down.

We had a bit of a slower weekend than originally planned. I ended up going out with some friends on Friday night and was feeling a bit worse for wear on Saturday. It wasn't that hard to talk PK into spending the day chilling out instead of working on stripping the windows. Don't listen to what he says; I wasn't holding a gun to his head to surf over 4000 items on Ebay for "vintage door bells". (Having just re-read that last sentence I realize we need to get a life.)

On Sunday we tried staining the large west-facing window. Parts of it came up a treat, others will need some additional sanding before they look as good as we would like. It was a bit disheartening as PK has spent a lot of time sanding and finishing the boards, but you get that.

Sunday night we decided to try out some paint colors on the dining room walls. We have been stocking up on paint chips from Lowes and the Home Despot for the last few weeks, and could probably cover most of the available wall space with the selection we have. Of course, we are trying to find "period appropriate" colors so we have been looking at earthy Craftsman colors. Well, that's what I thought we were doing. We both chose a couple of colors each to try out. I chose a fairly tame green color from Olympic called Sweet Annie. PK chose this fetid yellow rotten egg color from Eddie Bauer. I cannot express to you how ill this color makes me feel. I'm sure in the right circumstances (i.e. if we had an outhouse) it would fit right in. I think it must be my peculiar aversion to eggs, but this color on our dining room would make me feel hung over even when I wasn't. It just doesn't work in our dining room. (It even makes me feel ill writing about it - and I'm nowhere near the paint sample!)

So PK is picking up another test pot tonight on his way home from work - Calico from Eddie Bauer. Contrary to what its name suggests, it's a deep claret red. Fingers crossed it fits - otherwise we may be stuck with the karitane sunshine that PK so loves. (I think it should have been called "Dewalt Yellow").

I think I'll post some pics and get a little poll going - see what y'all think.

More soon ........

Edit: The Calico is a no-go. Sort of a bloody brown. Not what we were after, so it's back to the drawing board color-wise. Hopefully we'll have something by this weekend.

Uh-oh, the white walls are looking awfully appealing!

2005-11-08T17:30:00.000-08:00

Last time I wrote we were heading back to put the second coat of primer onto the living and dining rooms. The first coat took us about seven hours – the plaster just soaked up the paint like a sponge, so it took ages to get good coverage. The second coat took about an hour and a half – seriously.

For the first coat we used Life Saver Primer. We then ran out and our local paint store wasn’t open on a Sunday, so we resorted to Lowes and bought some Zinsser 123 Bulls Eye Primer. Both worked out fine, we thought we preferred the Zinsser but that may have been because it felt like it went on easier.

The white walls in the front rooms make such a difference, I am starting to see why people prefer a good thick coat of white paint. Both rooms feel lighter and cleaner, even with all the paint scrapings and crap on the floor that we have managed to deposit over the last week. It could have something to do with the paint tarps we have on the floor too – they have covered the sad state of our unfinished Douglas Fir floorboards until we decide what to do with them. Never fear, we are planning on painting the walls period appropriate colors come Thanksgiving weekend.

Steamy windows (or lack thereof)

2005-11-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

The other project we have been working on this week is stripping the paint off the windows in both the front rooms. PK is working on getting the sash windows working again as well. There are small double hung sash windows on both front windows that look out onto the street, and also a large one looking north from the dining room.

Of course, I use the term “windows” very loosely at this stage – I believe you have to have GLASS in them. The plywood covers PK made are so boho Mexican Mafia chic, I’m tempted to keep them for that Category 7 hurricane we’re going to have at some point in the future (according to that bad made-for-TV movie by CBS*).

PK has removed all the sash windows from the dining room, and we are in the process of scraping the paint from the windows while they are out and easily accessible.

Hey, I’m happy when I get to sit on my arse and do paint removal. The Silent Paint Remover comes in very handy about now. While PK inches away with the heat gun on the dining window that’s still attached to the house, I get to peel large strips of paint off using the SPR. Neat-o.

It’s taken most of the week after work to get the large window stripped of paint. What a difference it makes having electricity in those front rooms now that daylight savings has ended. For those readers outside the States, it’s now dark at 5PM when we leave work, so having lights in the dining and living rooms means we can keep working after dark. PK and Dave did a bang up job with the wiring, and it’s made us appreciate this modern marvel called electricity. We keep talking about “instant on lighting” like it’s wireless networking – something so new fangled we have to explain it to people. “You walk in the room, and press a button, and the lights go on! It’s amazing!”

We’ll keep going at the paint removal until all the windows in the dining and living room are stripped, then it’s the fun part of sanding, rubbing the wood down with denatured alcohol to clean the last 80 years of crap off, and then we get to stain. Roll on Thanksgiving and that four day weekend!

Next post we’ll talk about brickwork and boiling the crap out of window hardware – otherwise known as “Fun With Baking Soda!™”

P.S. Damian is coming over to the dark side. I’m sure he’s a closet Nine Inch Nails fan – check out this pic of him watching the Meathead Perspective’s latest NIN Flash presentation on our computer.

(*Actually, I wouldn’t know if it was bad or not, we don’t have cable so we didn’t watch it. Even the ads on the radio sounded bad. It’s only been 10 weeks since Katrina, c’mon now.)

As promised .........

2005-10-30T08:27:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, we haven’t dropped off the face of the earth in the last oooh, three months or so since we last updated. Work is continuing on the house, though we have had some changes in plans (it wouldn’t be a “work in progress" otherwise!)

Since we last wrote in August, (in no particular order) we have:

Removed the old plaster and lath from the ceilings in both the dining and living rooms. This was a horrible job, and one that I managed to wriggle my way out of somehow. Bringing down a ceiling with eighty five years of dirt, dust and pidgeon poo was not my idea of fun, so we enlisted the assistance of our resident handy person, Dave. Here are the pics to prove it was just as messy as we thought it would be. In fact, it was so nasty that I had to do a late night mercy mission to get some eye rinse for PK, as his vision went blurry from all the crap they were covered in.
Replaced some structural beams that were chewed to cardboard by previous termite visitations. Greedy little buggers …….
Rewired both the front rooms for electric (CAT 5 and 6 still to come)
Put insulation into the walls in the dining and living rooms.

It’s amazing the difference it makes in the front rooms. Either that or it’s just because it took us the entire summer to get to this stage, so it’s cooled off anyway. Oh well, at least it’s quieter in those rooms now.
Some of the bricks on the front porch have been removed, cleaned up and re-mortared. The rest will be done when we feel like it. (photos coming)
Put up drywall and plastered the living and dining rooms. Note the large drywall hoist that PK used to install the drywall onto the ceiling.

After getting a couple of sheets installed he decided he needed additional assistance (REAL assistance, I’m no good with heavy lifting) so he went down to Home Depot and picked up a couple of guys to help out. We were AMAZED at how FAST these guys worked. Incredible. Made us look like fat white people. Hmmmmm …..

Unfortunately the drywall ended up being a right pain in the proverbial, so we ended up getting our trusty plasterer to finish it off.

The first time around the plasterer came over while I was away in Maryland for work. The first rule of renovation – don’t have the contractor come over to do something decorative while the wife is away. He did a fantastic job – but it was totally the wrong finish. We asked for cat’s face – and we got cat’s face. Unfortunately what we wanted was sand finish. Not sure how we screwed that one up, but we learned the hard (read: more money) way. Luckily the plasterer was able to come back a week later while I was home and re-do the walls. Poor guy, he was probably cursing us (in Welsh, I’m sure) from here to Vegas (he’s just moved there).Here are some pics of what the first round of plaster looked like:

Kind of hard to see, but it’s actually quite …. blotchy. Not the look we were going for.

Here’s a look at the new plaster, before we primed it today:
Stripped the wainscoting out of the dining room, planed it down to clean wood and are in the process of restaining. It had a lot of insect damage on the outside surface, so we had to scrub the wood with wire wool before we could put it through the Dewalt planer that PK bought to take the first few layers of wood off each board. More photos to come.
While I was on holiday in NZ, PK and his lovely sister did some amazing work around the house. PK put up an awesome porch swing so we can sit out there and keep tabs on the neighbours – I mean, keep an eye out for trouble makers. PK’s sis did a Wonderwoman stint in the back yard and it still looks fab. She’s a keeper, I tell ya!
Painted the living and dining rooms with primer (one coat so far, the next one depends on PK’s skills to locate a source for another 5 gallons of primer on a Sunday as our local store is shut).

Hey wait a minute ….. that looks kinda familiar ……..

WHAT??!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Nah, just joking. It’s only primer, kids. Nothing to be scared of there. We’re gonna throw some color at it real soon, I promise.

Righto, PK is back with the McDonalds for breakfast then we’re making a start on the second coat of primer (PK couldn’t find another source for the same one we used for the first coat, so he’s buying another brand. Hopefully this is kosher and we are not offending the primer gods by this heinous act.)

More soon ……..

Edit: Oops, nearly forgot. Gratuitous kitty pic ...........

Updates coming soon

2005-10-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

I promise. Due to popular demand (alright, two people gave us the hard word) I will update on what's been happening VERY SOON. Right now we have to go prime the front rooms so I'm not allowed to update. PK will have my guts for garters if I don't get off the computer. Honest. It's true, I get squirted with the water pistol! And I bought that for the cats. (No Jamie, not really.)

New Garbage Disposal Unit

2005-08-01T18:09:00.000-07:00

We replaced the garbage disposal unit last night. Conforming to my master plan to massively over engineer every aspect of the house, we jammed in the biggest one we could find.

The old one (above) has been broken for a while. We’d been holding off replacing it, because we have better things to spend money on, but its not pleasant coming home each night and having the food scraps in the garbage can smelling out the front of the house. We finally caved on the weekend and went and bought one from Home Depot.

One of my pet peeves is when you put too much stuff down one of these things and they jam up. The old one couldn’t pull the skin off custard. I don’t think that’ll be a problem with this one. It’s rated at 1hp, auto reverse with thermal cutout, and gas powered vortex waste burner.

OK. I made up the bit about the waste burner. Sure would be cool though…….

Stripping the porch II

2005-08-01T18:08:00.000-07:00

We’re pretty much done with stripping the paint off the front porch. Its funny, I keep telling myself that it will look better when it’s done. It does look better without the paint, but it’s a shame how damaged the bricks are. Hopefully, after they’ve been re-mortared, they’ll look a bit more presentable. If they don’t we’ll just paint them again :)

The next porch project is to re-mortar the bricks. We’ve got about 3 different generations of mortar. The oldest (I think) is almost black and quite soft and gritty. You can see little bits of stone in it.

The next is quite sandy colored and more doesn’t look too bad.

This last shot is what most of our mortar looks like.

Not pretty. When you say “I’m going to replace the mortar” in your head, it doesn’t sound all that bad. I went up to Lowes and bought a cheap angle grinder and a diamond blade and started cutting.

I spent an hour or so on Sunday afternoon. This is as far as I’ve got. Its dirty, tedious, and exacting work. Looks like I’m going to spend my upcoming weeks vacation “on the bricks”

Speaking of vacation, my sister is coming to visit. She’s going to stay with us for a few days and has offered to help work on the house. Silly girl. The cool thing, is that she’s very “arty” and when the time comes to do the fun interior stuff (like stencils, friezes, art glass etc, she’ll be perfect. I’m not sure how she is with brick though. Oh well, maybe we’ll just go to Magic Mountain and ride roller coasters :)

Stripping the porch

2005-07-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks to our water main upgrade, we’re now able to run the sprinklers out the back, as well as two water blasters without any noticeable drop in pressure. Why two water blasters? you might ask, well you see our house is very yellow. Very yellow indeed.

We’ve spent the last month stripping the paint from the bricks on the front porch. The house managed to make it through to about 2002 before some genius thought they’d “improve” things by adding a splash of color. I don’t know how long it took them to paint it, but it’s taken us about 60 hours and several hundred dollars to remove. We’re not quite done yet, but wanted to get some pictures up to show our progress.

The paint is latex, over red clay brick. It’s a bad combination as the paint is actually absorbed into the brick. I initially started using “Dads” brush on paint stripper. Unfortunately it’s a bit runny and evaporated straight off. I hit the internet and, after looking at several sites of people in the same position, found a product called “Peel away”. It goes on thick, like cookie dough, and is then covered with a layer of paper to stop it from drying out. It takes about 24-48 hours to do its thing (although we left some bits on a lot longer), but it does work.

The pictures below have us about 80% done. You can see some of the paper on the right hand pillar.

The thing that amazes me is how long it takes to strip off. Laying it up was pretty quick, but we’ve probably got about 50 hours between us in stripping it off. Every time I tell myself “just one more day”, I finish the day with “just one more day” worth of work.

We got the last of the paint off the brick today and moved onto the concrete slabs on top of the brick. We were able to use the remainder of the “Dads” stripper on this, as well as a couple of cans of Jasco.

Here’s AK painting the stripper on. Looks like I got her good side :)

One side nearly done.

Take care not to breath the fumes, if you use this stuff. Strange things happen.

We got the other side stripped, but ran out of light before we could finish the upper pillar supports. Looks like one more days work and we’ll be done.

Big, big thankyou’s to John R and Tim S for the use of their water blasters. We’re nearly done. Honest.

Water main. Part II

2005-07-24T21:51:00.000-07:00

The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed the code violation in the way we had brought the water main into the house. It turns out that you can’t use female threaded PVC pipe, or fittings, as they can crack. Apparently you’re also supposed to use primer with the PVC cement to help it bond better.

There. All better.

After replacing the PVC with a short length of 1 ¼ copper we passed the plumbing inspection. The city inspector was pretty good about explaining what we’d done wrong, and what we needed to do to fix it. Lets hope he keeps his sense of humor. He’s going to be around a lot.

Well color me gob smacked.....

2005-07-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

We've been in the house for a bit under 3 months now, and we had our first real experience with the City yesterday. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed.

We’ve got one of the local contractors working on our sprinkler system. In the picture below, the two large areas of turf are serviced by two separate sprinkler zones, while the two patches between the road and the sidewalk – as well as the strip to the left of the driveway have to fend for themselves. To make matters worse, there were a couple of broken “pop ups” in the existing zones, so the lawn was starting to look a little sad.

Dave (aka Contractor guy) was able to fix the broken pop up heads pretty quickly and we then started to plan out the additional runs.

As part of this project, we decided to move the valves for the existing runs to the side of the house to tidy up the front garden (You can just see them to the right of the right hand piller), run a couple of new hose bibs, and shift the water main. The old water main had been replaced, in the not too distant past, with 1 inch PVC. All well and good, except that whoever had run it had been to lazy to bury it and it ran along the top of the garden for about 6 ft.

Hmmm. I see a trend emerging here. Touch one thing, end up working on something else, something else, something else etc and before you know it you’ve replaced everything.

So a new trench was dug, and the old water main and meter exposed.

It’s a little hard to make out in this picture, but this is small meter. It has an internal bore of 5/8th of an inch, a ¾ inch output with an adapter stepping it up to the 1 inch pipe. Well that just wouldn’t do. I had visions of running all the sprinklers, a shower, washing machine and flushing the toilet at the same time, and there not being enough water for the dish washer (which we don’t have – but plan to get one day) The pipes running into the meter were plenty big (2 inch), so we just needed a new meter.

And this is where the City comes in.

Dave heads up to the Dept of Public Utilities office at 8:00am yesterday morning. After explaining what we needed, and that we already had the trench dug and were in kind of a hurry, a guy turned up at my front door 30 minutes later. I kid you not, 30 minutes.

Of course his first question was “why do you want to swap out a perfectly good water meter. You can’t possibly need a 1 inch flow”. I tried to share my glorious vision of sprinklers, baths, showers and water for everyone. I’m not sure that he bought it, but he called it in and by 9:15 we had a new meter

Now that’s more like it. A trip to the Lowes to pick up some 1-1/4 PVC tubing and a few elbows and Dave has the water running again.

This is the new ball valve where the main joins the old ¾ inch galvanized pipe into the house. Isn’t it , heh, BIG?

The old galvanized piping is pretty nasty inside. Between however many years of corrosion and crap that’s built up inside it its choked right down and full of rust. Like I said, we’ll end up replacing the whole lot.

This is the tee off for the ¾ inch sprinkler run. This will go to a manifold that feeds the 4 sprinkler valves.

Memorial Weekend – AKA the hell weekend working on the house

2005-06-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

Some people like to have a holiday when they get days off work. Not so in this household. We took the extra day as a sign to start an extra nasty project – stripping the popcorn ceiling in the dining room.

Of course, it makes sense to purchase all the necessary supplies for the above project BEFORE the day you want to start. Don’t leave it ‘til late Saturday morning to head on down to Lowes like we did.

The longest part was getting all the plastic hung. You have to cover the walls, windows and floor with contractor grade plastic to ensure none of the mess escapes. Another tip: make sure you buy CLEAR plastic to hang over the walls and windows. Black plastic is not a good idea if you want to see what you’re doing.

Once we got the plastic hung, it was time to kit up in our Ghostbuster’s gear and have at it. Let’s just say we now know how they faked the moon landing footage – it was in a room being prepared for popcorn ceiling removal.

You can never be too careful…..

After scraping, its time to throw a quick coat of latex on the old plaster.

We finished about 9:30 on Saturday night. Pretty much dead on our feet, but managed to scare the neighbors by dragging out the plastic sheet and throwing it in the back of the truck. We probably should have taken the respirators off before going outside….

Here’s the ceiling the next morning.

It’s in pretty bad shape – but nothing a few sheets of drywall won’t fix.

Next on the list was removing the remainder of the drywall. The gave us an ides of the colors used in when the house was first built.

All the external walls have suffered from insect activity between the drywall and the wainscoting/lath and plaster.

Most of the insect damage is pretty minor, but the 2*4 framing underneath was cardboard in a few places. Due to this, we decided to remove the wainscoting (after first numbering each piece) and lath/plaster.

Nice of AK to get my good side. Still, turnabout is fair play…..

This wainscoting is from the bay window. Here we found “Ghost marks” from a window seat, and a little builder graffiti.

I wonder who “Griffith & Co” was. Something else to research.

At this point, the dining room looks pretty much like this:

Next on the dining room list is:
Run new electrical:
The Dining room, Living room and half the kitchen are all on the same circuit. We’ll split each room on to two circuits each – outlets and lights. The dining room previously had one outlet in it. It’ll get four duplex outlets – with the bottom half of three of them wired into the lighting circuit. That way we’ll have a ceiling fixture and a floor lamp (we can’t decide which corner to put it in – which is why we wired three of them) controlled from the light switch.

Run structured wiring:
Each room in the house will get Cat 6, RG 6 (co-ax) and telephone. Why? Because we can.

Add insulation:
Again, we’ll take advantage of the open walls and add batt insulation. Eventually we’re going to install Central AC and heat – so we might as well try and add some efficiency.

Dining Room Buffet

2005-06-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

Wahoo! It looks like there used to be a buffet between the dining room and the kitchen.
I was removing the drywall from the wainscotting and found a hole. It's too large to be a door and in the same place that I was intending to put a buffet so that's what we're going with.

Filthy rich and cat flap*

2005-05-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

Ahhh, if only the first part were true. The second however, is totally within our means ………

It's official - we are now a nuclear family. No, we haven't blown up yet - we just added two new members. Meet Psycho and Damian - former stray refugees, now lording it up in our house with their own cat condo.

We built the condo ourselves, as we couldn't justify spending the $400 odd on buying a pre-built one. Hey - we're re-doing a house - if we couldn't build a cat house, what kind of do-it-yourselfers would we be?

Of course, we now totally understand why people buy them. Our house is covered in carpet fluff, and PK is thoroughly sick of the sight of staples. Not to mention the little issue with the glue not being QUITE dry enough before the critters started using it. Nothing a little fur trim didn’t fix.

They were about 9 weeks old when we got them, so will be coming up for just on 12 weeks now.

We have only had a couple of incidents outside the kitty litter – twice on our bed, once in the bath and once in the cat bed. Actually, that’s more than a couple. Still, they are pretty good with staying off the carpeted areas (see, the cats don’t like it either) and more importantly, they haven’t done anything on the wood flooring. I’ve heard that it stains badly.

In true do-it-yourself style, we decided to put a cat door in so we could put the litter box and the food stuff out in the screened porch and away from the kitchen – that jellymeat stuff gets pongy. Another project successfully completed – only 1,000,213,456 more to go.

*After using this as the title for this entry, I started thinking about the TV program with Adrian Edmondson and Rick Mayall and can't for the life of me work out what the title refers to. Does anyone know?