I now know that the fire alarm in my son’s room does in fact work!  Don’t worry, there was no fire!  I just happened to set it off while I was using the heat gun around his door frame! I have to admit it scared the buggers ouf of me when it started going off. Something I learned though, besides the fact that the talking fire alarm works, is that Brendan (our son) sleeps through any thing! It took me a while to get the alarm turned off and Brendan didn’t move a muscle.

So back to what I wanted to post about: my many projects. Key word here is many! Note to Shane: sorry honey, I know it’s driving you crazy! So I really tried to just start one project and finish it before moving onto another. However, in my defense it is hard to take the heat gun and sander after the wood work when I’m home all day with Brendan.

My first project, the newel post, is coming along. All of the paint is off and Shane started sanding it for me. All that is left is to continue sanding. This is definitely easy enough, however, it is on-hold until we can get Brendan out of the house since it makes a lovely mess and we don’t have doors up here.

My second project is stripping the doors which is why they are not upstairs! Shane took them downstairs for me so the fumes could be in the basement. I have the old bathroom door almost done. I need to take liquid stripper after the sides that face the frame. I tried to take the heat gun after it, but it started smoking. Whoever painted it, just painted onto the unfinished wood making it not so easy! I decided to put this off as I hate working with liquid stripper. Actually, let me clarify…I don’t actually hate the product, because whatever Shane bought me works super fast and actually does the job! What I hate is the smell and I refuse to use it in the house.

Now that this door is on-hold, let’s move on to the other door. The other door is the one we removed from the bedroom/office going into the kitchen. This will be the new upstairs bathroom door. I have one side done thanks to the heat gun and I just started on the backside. I would seriously be done by now, but the electrician showed up and I’m too nice of a person to make him smell the fumes. Actually, I didn’t want him to leave early because of the fumes. Hehe. The electric company was suppose to be here Thursday and never showed and never called. So needless to say I’m not taking any chances!

Last project (yes another one) is the wood work upstairs. I figured why not since every thing else up here was in the process too. I finished the bathroom framing and started on my son’s door frame for his room. I was doing great! I was motivated and eager to finish. Then the fire alarm goes off. *sigh* Now I have no motivation and am sitting here writing this. I apologize if I’m jumpng all over. It’s been too long since I posted last.

On a slightly different note. In our basement bathroom we’ve decided to paint the window trim and baseboards. I’m wondering what to do with the door. Should we paint the bathroom side of the door and leave the front stripped etc., or should I just finish the bathroom side? Would it look funny having all the wood painted, except the door? Or another option is to not paint the window trim or the door and just paint the baseboards? Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

My memory must be failing me. I cannot remember if I ever shared the lovely thing that was found under the basement bathroom’s vanity when it was ripped out by the demo people. If I’m repeating myself, ignore me. When they pulled out the vanity, they found quite a bit of mold growing on the bottom of it. This vanity was on the corner of the bathroom that abutes two exterior walls.  It did not have a sink; it was a “dry” vanity per say.

After the walls were ripped out, there was some insulation laying in that corner that had plastic backing. It was left there for several days and one day I decided to clean it up a bit and lifted it up. I wasn’t expecting to hear the insulation dripping when I lifted it, but that is indeed what I heard. There was around a quarter of an inch of standing water in the corner. Keep in mind this corner was completely dried out after the initial water damage, so it had formed from something else. Being these basement walls were more for holding the house up, and never really intended to be used as living space, my first guess is it was seepage through the walls.

I was stuck. As seen in a past post, I’ve been putting up foam boards over the concrete to prevent this type of issue in the rest of the basement, but the bathroom is already framed in. So it impossible to get foam boards put behind them without ripping them out entirely. So my first option was to put the insulation back in for a while, and deal with it later. Obviously extremely far from ideal. After pondering it for a while, I had one of those light bulb moments. An old high school friend of mine does insulation for a living, mostly the foam insulation. So I called him up to ask him if the stuff would seal up the walls, which is said it works great for that purpose. In fact, he was driving around town and was only a few blocks away so he stopped by to look. After telling me what it would cost to get an inch of insulation sprayed in (around R7, which in combination with the fiberglass R11 that will go in, it will be R18), I jumped on it. I was expecting $500+ as I knew the stuff was quite expensive. He gave me a friend discount (free labor) that was less than half of that.

So two Saturdays ago, he came over with the huge truck (26′ all dedicated to the fancy foam equipment… supposedly worth well over $100k) and a buddy and they had the bathroom sprayed and cleaned up in less than an hour.

Sorry about the first few pictures being so dark, I didn’t realize how bad they were until they were shrunk down.

If you are ever considering doing this, I *highly* recommend it. Right before he sprayed, I went through and scraped off all the loose paint and found a crack in the foundation that I have a feeling was the source of the water I had found. When my friend showed up, I asked him if I needed to seal it up before getting it sprayed, and he said that the foam will completely take care of it by itself.

Since I have a bunch of foam board left, I’ll probably continue using that until I run out for the rest of the basement as it serves the same purpose, just doesn’t work quite as well. Once I run out, I’ll probably have this stuff sprayed in the remainder.

By the end of the week, my lovely foam will be hidden hopefully for decades to come.

Since I’ve been lacking on the posting and picture posting recently, I thought I’d give you an outdated update.

Did I mention we found mold? On this wall right here:

The poly was put up to keep it from being disturbed. The guy doing the drywall said that it would be easier to put up new drywall than to patch up the stuff that was there, so I spent an evening tearing it down. 75% of the way through, I happened to look at the lathe in front of me. It all had a shade of green with black blotches here and there. Ughh, mold. I stopped there, grabbed a spray bottle with some bleach in it and wet the areas exposed down and called it a night. The company that did the initial water cleanup came in and took down the rest of the drywall and had the drywall guy put up the poly until they could bring in the big guns. This was a Friday. On Monday, a guy came over with a pump sprayer with some nasty chemicals. Our drywall guy ended up leaving early that day as his nose and ears were burning after smelling the stuff all day. I don’t blame him, it was pretty wicked.

Here is the chimney side:

If you look close, you can see the location that the stove’s exhaust used to be on the chimney about a foot and half below the ceiling (that little white circle to the left of that middle stud).

On this wall, you can see where the plaster was yanked down that I believe I mentioned in a previous post:

It was in pretty bad shape, the contractors were wanting to just put a layer of drywall on top of it, cutting the height of the trim around it in half. So I volunteered to take down the only plaster left in the room. On a different note, the paint that is falling off in the rear entry way looks like a flying bird…

Now, we found a really interesting thing when taking down a lone piece of insulation:

There is a little door, all framed in above the ceiling. This happens to be in our son’s closet, under the carpet and linoleum. Any guesses on what this could be? My best guess is just a place to hide valuables (house was built in 1928 – a year before the stock market crash).

Stay tuned for post-drywall pictures and more information about our basement bathroom!

We’ve gotten to the frustration part of the rebuild/repair. We are having too many “I want to pull my hair out” moments recently. We have a general contractor/project manager that doesn’t really do a whole lot. He set up the initial workflow and then hasn’t really been actively involved since then. Lately, Casey has felt more like a general contractor than he has. We get a call from one contractor telling us to tell another contractor they need to get something done before they can work. Then the other contractor tells us to call them back and relay more information to them that they can indeed get working.

Then there are the constant no-shows, and no-calls. I’m a prompt kind of guy. If I tell you I’ll be somewhere by 8AM, I’ll be sitting in your driveway by 7:55AM and will knock on your door at 8AM. We had a plumber who was supposed to call on Monday to come over. No call, no show. So Tuesday, I call up the company and tell them that if they don’t show up today we are going to find someone else. Once again, the job of the general contractor.

We are getting sick of delays, getting sick of people not calling, and getting sick of people not showing up.

However, the contractor I talked about in the previous post (the one who ran an errand for us) has been great. He shows up when he is going to show up, and works the entire day. We even bought some Fighting Sioux hockey tickets from him (he had 4 season tickets, we bought two for a game) and sat next to him and his wife. It is hard not to give him a shout out yet, but I am going to hold back until the last nail is driven and bills are paid.

Sorry for no pictures, I have a pile on my home PC but I haven’t had the time to sit down for more than a few minutes at a time. I can tell you that our upstairs bathroom has drywall up and the first two layers of mud applied. We have a hole in our floor for the tub drain. We should have our faucet show up today or tomorrow and then the supply lines can be installed.

Our main floor kitchen is about half drywalled. Since it is under the upstairs bathroom, it has to wait until the tub supply lines are ran before the drywall can go up. And the drywall that will be on the walls under that piece of drywall have to wait for it to be installed. However, we do have a gas line for our stove, and a water line for our fridge ran and done.

Going to our downstairs bathroom, we decided last minute to move our washer and dryer into it as the bathroom is wayyyy too big for a basement bathroom. So the no-call, no-show plumber who finally showed up ran the water lines and drain line for the washer. Now we are only waiting on electricians, who should be here today or tomorrow, to come run the dryer line. Oh, and the plumber has to get the dryer vent installed. That requires going through a layer of wood, a layer of concrete, and another layer of wood. Plus a layer of foam (more on that to come). But once the dryer vent and the dryer power line are ran, that room can be insulated and rocked.

For now, I will keep telling myself: soon, Shane, soon. And in the meantime, I’ll keep ripping out the little hair I have.

I love the contractor who is doing the majority of the “rebuild” of our home. He is prompt, very kind, and seems to do a good job. Until the job is done, I’m not going to name his company as I don’t want to eat my words two weeks from now when drywall starts falling off my ceiling; knock-on-wood.

As I mention in my last post, our bathroom floor is finally a full floor:

It is hard to imagine looking at it currently that it will all look similar, but I have high hopes that once the old floor is sanded and finished, the two halves will blend pretty well. Will it be perfect? I doubt it. But this is going to be infinitely better looking than the ceramic tiles laid over the original Douglas fir. One of my first fears of going with new fir was that the grain wouldn’t be as tight. Granted the old floor has a few boards that have tighter grain than any of the new ones, the majority of it is very similar to the new floor:

Here is just the new wood:

Here is just the old wood:

From here, he is going to be framing out the vent stack that runs behind the toilet, and then will be throwing the drywall up. This should started, if not complete, by the end of tomorrow.

Do you remember how we had a contractor out to look at our floors and he was totally not on the same page as us? Well, this contractor is pretty darn close to being on the same page. He actually lives a couple blocks away in a 1920s home. He isn’t into the old stuff quite as much, especially when it comes to plaster, but from the sounds of it, he and his wife appreciate the majority of the older home items. He told Casey he even had new wood trim cut to match the original, and has a refinished claw foot tub. He had a few suggestions for finishing the outside of our claw foot tub:

Not only did he have some good suggestions, but today, he actually grabbed the feet for the tub and ran them over to a friend’s shop to have them sandblasted in a booth for us on his way to pick up some more materials. How often do you find contractors that run errands for you?

During this odd weather for North Dakota (rain in February?), we were supposed to be getting some drywall delivered to our porch yesterday. But due to the wet weather, it was put on hold to avoid ruining it. Instead, when I opened the garage door last night, I saw several lengths of Douglas Fir flooring! Yes, our bathroom floor is finally going to be installed.

Today I decided to come home for lunch rather than eat at my desk like I normally do. The contractor, who is a really friendly guy, was about half way done installing the floor. While it wasn’t getting installed the way I would have liked with getting it blended in, I think it will still work. Essentially the left half of the room is old flooring, the right half is new flooring. As of right now, with the old flooring not sanded yet, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Hopefully after a good sanding it’ll blend in a bit more.

I apologize for no pictures, I will do my best to take some tonight and hopefully get them up. I’ve been asked to remove the crumbling plaster in our kitchen. It is the only wall that still has plaster and it will make the contractor’s job easier to just throw a sheet of drywall over it. I don’t mind since the rest of the room is drywall already. So that is in my list of to-do’s along with taking pictures. Also on the list is getting our cast iron claw foot tub painted on the outside. We have decided to use the tub epoxy paint on the outside that is normally used on the inside for repairs. It should be a much stronger finish than regular paint.

I should really post more, I am going a million different directions with this post. Last night when I got home from work, I went down to our basement bathroom and removed some old insulation that was laying down in the exterior corner of the room. Lucky for me, when I pulled it up, I found 1/4″ of standing water. So our concrete is seaping in a bit of moisture. To fix that, I called up an old high school friend who happens to do spray foam insulation for a living. He drove over and said that he could spray an inch of it on for around $1.75 a square foot. So around $250 to get it finished. To me, that is pocket change compared to having to fix mold issues down the road. So hopefully he can stop out soon to spray it down. We’ll then put R11 fiberglass batts over the top of the foam and finish it with drywall. Hopefully I won’t see any more standing water on the floor.

Over the weekend, I also ran a couple runs of speaker wire (12 gauge from www.monoprice.com) to the kitchen to eventually have a couple small speakers in there.

Like I said, a million different directions… I have an excuse though… I went to bed around 9:3o last night as usual. However, I woke up at 12:45 and literally laid in bed until 3:45, when I took a Tylenol PM to knock me out. I finally fell asleep around 4. I’ve never had that happen before. I am going to blame it on the few Diet Captain Morgans and the Washington Apple I had with the previously mentioned high school buddy to catch up. Normally that would help me sleep better, but it is the only guess I have.

Here is the corner I’ll be tackling next for insulation (depending on an issue that will be described after the pictures):

Excuse the mess. That is what happens when you move into a house that was just water damaged and you know that you can’t really put much out as it’ll all have to be moved around at some point during restoring.

You can see the 7 and some odd pieces of foamboard I have left. Should be enough to do that little left corner, the wall on the back, as well as up to that window on the top right. However, before I can do those areas, I need to figure out what to do with this:

That bottom pipe is our water supply line (just to the right of the picture, it drops down to the floor to the main valve). The top pipe is out main gas line coming in from the meter. While the gas line isn’t in the way of the foamboard insulation, the water line is directly up the concrete. Is this too critical of an area to learn how to do plumbing or is it pretty hard to screw up? I’d like to move it through the joists and keep it out of the way. If you recommend going forward with this myself, would you do copper, PVC, or PEX? I like the look of PEX, but I’m not sure if it well suited for your main incoming water line.

The gas line I’d be more likely to hire out. I just don’t like the thought of a pin hole in a pipe leaking natural gas into my basement. Here is where the gas line comes in (you can also see another water line run):

Once I figure out how to do this plumbing thing, I’ll get lots more practice over by the washer:

That knob valve is for the exterior water faucet. Looks like at some point someone didn’t like the amount of pressure they were getting off of that line that runs to the washer so they decided to T off the main incoming water line and run one straight over here.

And here are some pictures for Todd at Home Construction Improvement. These are the boards between the joists I was talking about in the comments on the last post. They might be able to be removed. I’m not sure what their purpose is nor what is behind them. I think they are just holding in rock wool if I were to guess.

Here is a few joists over in a another area I’m not exactly sure what to do… expanding foam?

And some dreaded knob and tube wiring that is going to be in the way. They run directly between the joist and the concrete. I’m not exactly sure where they are going to be honest. Either to the porch light (less likely) or to the main floor bedroom outlets (more likely). I’ll have to look into it a bit further to determine it.

During a leisurely stroll through Lowes a week or so ago, Casey and I managed to find ourselves getting ahead of ourselves by looking at foamboard insulation to start insulating the basement. We were just looking — seriously — when we found a deal too good to pass up. Foamboards that were originally $13 per 4×8 sheet were being clearanced out for $3 a sheet. We had no intentions on starting this basement project for a while. However, who can pass up a deal like that? We went home to think about it, and early the next day while I was at work, Casey ran over to buy every last one they had in stock. Fourteen when it was all said and done.

Of course, buying some sheets of foamboard can’t be as simple as buying them, loading them, and bringing them home. No, of course not. She borrowed her parent’s Chevrolet Blazer. Who knew that 4×8 sheets do not fit into a Blazer? So I borrowed my boss’ truck and ran out there to pick them up, when the wind chill was in the -30* range. It isn’t fun tieing sheets down to a truck without gloves when it is that cold outside.

All said and done, we had 14 sheets of foamboard insulation tucked away in our garage.  Now I was on a mission.

First, I moved all my junk away from the walls. It is amazing how much smaller a room gets when you take everything from the sides and put it in the middle. Next, I washed the concrete walls off and put a fan on it to let it dry. Well, before this was done, I had to also remove an outlet that was nailed into the concrete. That is harder to do than you’d think…

Next, I put some foamboard adhesive (yes, that is what it is called) on the back of the foamboard and slapped it onto the concrete. The stuff doesn’t hold well at first, so I pushed some boxes of tile up against the bottom, and used some masking tape to hold the top and side edges down for the night. By morning, it wasn’t going anywhere. As I worked with it more, I realized that in my basement, with the uneven walls, it works better to apply the adhesive to the high points on the concrete rather than to the foamboard as I’m sure that the low areas are never in contact with the foamboard.

Here is the one corner of the room insulated up to the joists:

All-in-all, I’m quite pleased with the method and the result (looks a lot better than the rough 80 year old concrete!).

From here, I will eventually frame up walls against the foamboard and use R11 (possibly R13, depending on if I can hit a sale) between the studs. If you want to learn more about this method, check out Todd’s website, Home Construction Improvement for the intricate details. I bugged Todd a couple times with some questions and he has helped out quite a bit in answering them. Thanks again Todd!

Hello. Thanks every one for the comments about my our bed! Posted below are more detailed pictures.  The bed does need some work, but I’ll get to that maybe this Summer or following Winter!

The headboard is full of detail and quite ornate.

The footboard is ornate as well. Something else I’ve noticed is the footboard is higher than other high back beds I’ve seen.

Like Shane mentioned in one of his comments, someone cut down the bed (which is very common), but it was “fixed.” I have to admit I didn’t notice this when I found it and bought it, because all I could stare at the was the detail on the headboard and footboard! It didn’t help either I guess that the antique store is out of an old, dark barn! Oh well!

I couldn’t help but put this picture up too! This here is my baby! I found it at the same place I found our high back bed. The mirrors are as tall as the bed and the mirrors are the original beveled. I have to admit that furniture (antique of course) is my hobby!

I’ve got some surprising, breaking news for all of you: contractors are slow. I know, I know, set your jaw back. Who would have thought? After bugging the general contractor, and giving the subcontractor a push, they contracted (yes, that is correct, 3 layers of uber-efficiency here, my friends)  Roger to come out to throw some insulation up as it had been more than two weeks with bare walls in a North Dakota winter.

And here is that attic space to the left… the insulation you see is on the backside of the bedroom’s closet wall:

There is my project room, the ole do-your-business and turn the fan on on your way out room. To both collect our thoughts and put something down on “paper,” here is what we are planning for this particular room:

• Douglas Fir floors are going to be patched and mixed to blend the new material with the old
• Standard 5′ cast iron claw foot bathroom is going to be placed parallel with the bathroom window (just hauled that pig up the stairs Sunday! due to the really nice, original faucet, we will not be adding a shower to this unit as we have a shower in the basement)
• Walls will be painted (we will eventually look into bead board or subway tile, but not right away)
• Still not sure on paint vs not painting the trim
• Two antique wall sconces will be placed where they were originally before being covered up and having a single light
• We will leave our chimney exposed (I cannot for the life of me find the commentor who originally suggested this. I re-read all the comments 3 times and either missed it or imagined it. I apologize if it is the former for not giving credit when credit is due!)
• We are moving the light switch from outside of the room to the left of the chimney
• Walls will be painted a light yellowish color (you’d have to ask Casey for a womanesque description)

Moving onto our kitchen, that also is now insulated:

Both are temporary insulation jobs until the electrician shows up. We demanded the insulation be put up as I doubt the contractor is willing to write a check out for our soon-to-be-outrageous natural gas bill. While I had family (read: slaves/helpers) around this weekend, I yanked out the second window that was in the kitchen. I’ve got back and forth on this a few times. The entire back half of the room was originally a pantry is my guess. It was about four feet wide and spanned the entire width of the kitchen. That area that I suspected was originally a big window? Well, my mother actually thinks that the window that I just took out was originally over there.

When one of the POs converted what I suspect was a pantry into a bathroom, they moved (according to my mother) the window from that location to the next location to make room for the stand up shower. Well, we’ve decided to not have any window on that wall in order to give us much more options when it comes to laying out the kitchen cabinets. I was torn about not putting one back in, but in the end I decided that I’d take a nice layout over a window that looks into the neighbor’s kitchen.

Also, as you can see, we took out the old “bathroom” door that was in that corner that made cabinet configurations impossible. Not to mention a bedroom with two entrances:

Lastly, we finally got some dollar amounts for a replacement refrigerator and stove. We first ran to Lowes and didn’t much luck. Off to Sears (which was my first, out of high school job). There we found a floor model fridge that was being clearance’d off. A Kenmore Elite model that was originally almost $2000, down to $1100. It was definitely on the top end of what we wanted to spend (essentially the entire insurance money was spent on just the fridge). For the stove, we went a bit lower end and picked up a gas model that had to be ordered. So for now, the doors for the fridge:

[apologies for the white out, the sun is shining away and the picture wasn't reviewed until later (ie: now)]

We had a heck of a time getting the fridge into the house. The doors to our porch up front had to be taken off, as well as the doors on the fridge. In the process of first trying to get it through, we put a nice sized scratch on our brand new door:

(Thanks Casey for taking the picture for me ). You can see the scratch in the reflection, right where the camera is at. That vertical white line, about an inch long that is down to the metal. Any suggestions on fixing that?