In the last month, we made a couple decisions that are of the variety that will shape our lives tremendously. If you would have asked me a year ago if I thought I’d be making a blog post with these two items in it for the world to read, I would have said you were crazy. But many of you have become friends of ours, even if we have never met in person. If you ever end up in northeast North Dakota, you’ve got a warm bed and good eats waiting for you .

The bigger of the two decisions we made, was to expand our family. Casey is roughly 6 weeks along. After being inspired by The Macs, we are going to wait until out child is born to find our if we’ll be blessed with a little girl or another rambunctious adorable boy. So we now have another room to get baby’d. It’ll be a little different not knowing the sex, but I think we could have fun with it while making it work for whatever little bundle calls it home. We’ll be making the other upstairs bedroom into the nursery. I’d love to talk for paragraphs about this topic, but it is a bit difficult at this stage to come up with much more than what I provided .

The other big decision made is a major career shift on my end. We currently are blessed to be able to have me be the sole provider in the home, allowing Casey to raise our kids. It is the most underpaid (monetary) position in the world, but the reward of being able to spend your day with your kids are worth it (just don’t ask her on a bad day ). But, anyways, that big career change I mentioned… I’ll be transitioning from a full-time, salaried job to owning my own software development contracting company.

I’ve been paid to program since I was 15. I’m going to give you my story, whether you want it or not . I started out with one of those free websites with a full template back when I was ten. I’m pretty sure it said something like “I’m Shane, I’m ten. I have a website.” Impressive, right? I was mighty proud of it. From there, I transitioned into learning HTML to do some basic markup. Next, I transitioned into learning PHP so I could do cool things like tell you the date or something else jaw dropping like that. Then I got crazy and decided to write my own forum software. It was surprisingly successful until a huge security hole was discovered and I didn’t have enough time between school and it so I ended up selling it for some other poor schmuck to fix. I was 14 years old then.

Next, I started working for family doing some basic manufacturing to save up enough to buy parts to build my own computer. I was 15 at that time. With that new computer (using my futon as a chair, and the edge of a hand-me-down entertainment center as a desk) I started doing some free work to get my name heard. It wasn’t long until I was getting paid to do that work. I didn’t make much. Mostly enough to pay for gas and some gas station pizza at high school lunch breaks every now and then. Once I moved to college, I took up a job at Sears while moonlighting doing freelance programming. I lasted there for a year, and did another year at Napa until I landed a job after my sophomore year working for the company I do now. After graduating, I took a job at a $40bln company 5 hours away. It ended up being too hard to be that far from family, so we jettisoned back up here around the time this blog started and I went back to working for the company I am at now while letting them know I eventually wanted to go out on my own.

That takes us to now. As of November 1st, 2009, I’ll officially be self-employed. I’ve got my work cut out for me (speaking of which, contact me if you are an aspiring programmer [web or Windows based] and want to take on some work). I imagine this will explain the rush to get my downstairs office finished up soon.

Sooo, if you need any website or software development done, let me know. Also, if you are, or know, a good website designer, please let me know. Good designers are hard to come by, and I’ve got so much work I could dump on someone as long as they don’t expect to get paid a gazillion dollars per hour .

Sorry for rambling on so long about a career and leaving a paragraph to the more important point. I’m sure there will be much more to come on the baby, but little on self-employment . If you are coming over from houseblogs.net and are wanting to get baby updates, be sure to subscribe (http://www.google.com/reader, “Add Subscription,” “http://www.shaneandcasey.com/feed“) to our blog as I won’t be tagging it in a manner that will cause them to show up on there.

As I mentioned in the Office Progress post, the next step in finishing it for use was taping and mudding. If you had paid extra close attention to the pictures of the installed drywall, you might have noticed that I started with the screw holes then. I knew that at least those would be hard to screw (hah, pun intended) up. I was right about that one!

Well, being that I wanted to get the office done as soon as possible, I decided that I would go with non textured walls. We can always texture later if we want, but it is hard to go from textured to smooth. So I painstakingly applied the coats of mud thin and as smooth as I could. There aren’t many imperfections in the mud surfaces. I was pretty proud of myself. I threw up the paint and I found a few spots here and there that could be touched up. All-in-all, not bad for a first timer.

The next day, once the light was coming in better, I found an unexpected problem. The seams in the drywall that have the factory indentation are quite visible on at least 75% of the room. I didn’t put enough mud on. Everyone always says to put on thin coats, so that is what I did! I’m pretty certain that if the room had a medium texture, it wouldn’t be noticeable at all. But I will know that it is there, so I am going to fix it.

Has anyone else had this problem, or am I alone in staring at my walls from every possible angle wondering how I missed that little detail?

Hope you all had a good weekend. We had an extremely productive weekend ourselves! I’ve been driving a couple hours to my parent’s house every couple months to help them out with work they are doing on it. They decided to head this way with tools in hand this last weekend.

I literally had a “Dad’s List” in my Google Docs. A lot of it was small stuff that I could do, but just haven’t gotten to. Like the rear entry lights that I had accidentally knocked out power to when I rewired the living room and dining room. I swear half of the house was on one circuit. We also wanted to pick up some plywood and drywall since we don’t have a truck, and he has a 3/4 ton diesel. Casey also wanted to finally get drywall up on Brendan’s closet ceiling.

Well, he came up late Thursday night (a night earlier than expected – wahoo!). I headed out for work Friday morning and by noon he had gotten all the piddly stuff done. He even switched out all the light switches to white ones that we have been wanting to do for a while! So I took off from work early to head home to get stuff done.

After going home and turning on the rear entry light a few times just to remind myself what it was like, we headed out to Menards to pick up material. 18 sheets of drywall and 10 sheets of plywood later, along with some smaller stuff we needed (drywall screws, etc), we left with a much heavier truck, and a lighter wallet. We then unloaded all of that into our basement through our narrow stairway. It is not enjoyable.

See, normally I would stop at this point, grab a beer, and watch some TV smiling about how much I just got done. I mean, we moved a ton (literally) of material into the basement. That is a productive day right? Apparently not for my slave driver father . We jumped right into drywalling my office. First we had to throw up plastic on one more of the exterior walls and throw in some nailers (I made sure my studs were 16″ apart, just not on center. Whoops). By the end of Friday, we had the two exterior walls drywalled, and the wall around the furnace closet. The ceiling is going to have a clip on system thing installed to allow access to electrical and plumbing. Due to the cost, it’ll be installed later.

The two walls remaining weren’t done due to a couple of factors. One wall wasn’t built yet, and the other had plumbing that had to be rerouted to make room for an antique medicine cabinet. This was my first time working with pressurized plumbing. I had thrown a clean-out in a drain before, but nothing that held pressure. And, of course, I had lots of obstacles in my way. There was the box for a light fixture and a drain running at the upper portion of the wall. It required lots of 90 degree elbows and even some 2″ straight runs. All said and done, there wasn’t a single leak. I pinched myself just in case.

Here is what the plumbing looked like before (on the right). At the upper part of the wall, you can see the electrical box. I had to go behind that, and right above the drain.

So Saturday we built up the other wall and drywalled the wall that had my plumbing working (after installing the medicine cabinet, that is).

I swear our walls aren’t THAT yellow. And our ceilings are really that low (6′ 8″) that our light fixture needs to be that high.

Next was the most joyous thing I’ve ever done (I wish I could find a better way to show sarcasm…). For the rest of the basement to be completed, I need to lay down more of the Platon type material and 4×8 sheets of plywood we bought. One of the issues in front of me were a couple 1″ or so ridges in the concrete that would make the plywood bulge like no tomorrow. So we ran to the local rent shop and picked up a concrete grinder. You know, those things they use when sidewalks heave and make tripping hazards. If you have never used one of these, let me go over some of the things you might not know. They must weigh close to 300 pounds. No joke. It looked something like this:

They have a gas motor that sits on top. I imagine most have a pull start like ours do. Pray that your pull start cord is in better shape than ours. One pull and the rope snapped. So we had to rebuild that before we could even get started. These things are pretty loud too. Not earplugs loud, but close.

Once we dropped it to the concrete, it didn’t take more than 10 seconds for our entire basement to be a thick haze of concrete dust. After 5 minutes or so, we had found out what was under the concrete. In one section, it was in pretty rough shape and the grinder busted it up. They had laid nasty concrete on top of decades old brick. It was a nice light tan, slightly yellowish. I wish they would have left it as is. It would have looked amazing. It would have required rugs in areas you expect to rest your feet, but the looks would have been amazing. Oh well.

Twenty minutes after we started, we were done. We couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of us. We loaded the beast back up and I dropped it off. $150 poorer. Not to mention that he told me as I dropped it off that I could have put water on the floor to keep the dust down. Thanks sir! My dad had mentioned it before we started, but we both were hesitant as they didn’t say anything, and we didn’t want to ruin a $2,500 piece of machinery. Now we (and you!) know. Concrete grinding is the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in relation to house work. I’d rather snake a septic line.

It feels like we have a million projects going on right now, which is close to true. One of them has been restoring the windows in Brendan’s room. It has been a long process. I put in 30-60 minutes a day for a couple months. We are finally at the home stretch.

The windows were in pretty sore shape, but it was hard to tell prior to working on them. When Casey decided to strip all of the trim in that room, I figured we should probably knock out the windows in the process as we wanted to get to them next year anyways. So I yanked them out and took the hot air gun to them. The side and top rails of both the lower and upper sashes were in pretty good shape. The bottoms of the windows were in pretty terrible shape. So bad, that one of the lower sashes had a large chunk of the bottom rail(?) rotted out. Thankfully the wood facing the front and back didn’t have any rot, it was just the wood between it. I had to clean it out and use the equivalent of maybe 3-4 cups of filler to build it back up.

The upper sashes’ bottom rail was also in pretty rough shape, but not rotted. It had slowly sagged in the center, pulling the muntins away by 1/2″ to 3/4″. This required lots of wood hardener and wood glue to get it close to where it is supposed to be. It isn’t perfect, but it is much closer.

Once I got them all stripped and stained, I shifted focus to the glass. One of the windows had a broken pane. I took that window into a glass and window shop and had them replace the glass and glaze it. The glazing job wasn’t as good as I expected so I decided to do the rest myself. It likely was due to the 3 hour turnaround they gave me. The windows I glazed I was able to wait a day or two to clean up the leftovers without disturbing the smooth glaze lines much. It isn’t perfect, but I think it is pretty decent.

This lower sash was the one that was in the best shape. Apologizes for the bad lighting in these, they were taken downstairs in my soon-to-be new office.

And here is the better upper sash out of the two. I didn’t intentionally take pictures of the better sashes to hide the bad ones, it just happened to work out that way .

I definitely rank window refinishing as one of the least enjoyable tasks I’ve performed so far. However, I’ll detail the number one least enjoyable task in my next post .