Three years ago a friend of mine approached me with a simple question: would I want to help him solve his $55k/year problem? He was paying interchange fees that he’d rather keep, rightfully so. So we spent a few months going over what the ideal solution would be whenever we chatted.

Once we knew the general direction we were going, Ben took charge over the business, legal and PR side, and I was tasked with making a system capable of moving millions, or billions, of dollars in my spare time. At this point in my life, I had a one year old son, was paying wayyyy too much money on a rental house, worked at a job that didn’t pay enough to make ends meet, and had student loan repayments kicking in. Not the most opportune time for a project of this magnitude, but it was a challenge I wanted to take head on.

For the next two years, I would work 8-10 hours at my normal day job and go home. I’d sit down for a quick dinner, and then head downstairs where I’d spend the next 6-8 hours cramming away on this Dwolla project. Somehow I managed to never pass out at my day job (I actually did a pretty good job there as well. Though, looking back, I had lots to learn…) and my wife never divorced me. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she did.

While right in the midst of all of this, I bought a house that had pipes burst two days before closing. We spent the next 6-9 months in a construction zone, where I moved my makeshift office around to wherever was the least dusty.

As far as Dwolla goes, the first year I pretty much spent in proof-of-concept mode. I scrapped several different components along the way and rewrote them after finding a better way to do it. Financial service products were new to me, and I definitely had lots to learn.

One of our more interesting days was when we first moved money from A to B through the network I made. Ben’s response?

Another one was when I first set up sending money to Facebook and Twitter contacts. It was one of those ‘doh’ moments. I recall the first meetup I was able to attend in person, which was when we announced this feature. I sat in the corner of Mars Cafe glued to my laptop monitoring performance of the contact sync service. We ran into some issues earlier that day, so I was terribly nervous that the fixes I had put in place earlier in the day weren’t going to cut it. Thankfully all worked well and I was able to enjoy the rest of the night. It would have been nice to be able to announce the feature myself, but someone had to make sure things didn’t break

I’ve passed the three year mark this summer, which I’ll write about in another post. Hopefully less scatterbrained than this one.

Why?

• We don’t want to raise our kids in the city
• We want to knock out some debt
• Other than needing a new garage, we’ve done pretty much everything we wanted to on this house

The sign is going up this week, most likely. We spent the last weekend in a whirlwind of last minute touch-ups.

This blog likely won’t go anywhere, and the previous posts will show up again eventually.

Back to the grind…

We live in a pretty wet area. Wet, as in, almost once a year a river a few blocks away is higher than the road in front of our house. Since our water table is that high, I have to assume every surface of our basement will be moist once a year. Not much, but enough to rot out wood if it were directly against it over time. With this in mind, the entire sub-floor is elevated using a molded plastic material that is sold under the name Platon at our local hardware store. It is dimpled, allowing any moisture to find its way to the drain, as well as away from the surfaces above it. As a bonus, it acts as a vapor barrier. The product comes in a roll that is close to four feet wide with one side having a 4″ strip without dimples to overlap the previous run. The instructions say to seal the two together with the same type of material you’d use to seal a roof. I used house wrap tape as it is easier and I had it already.

My method was to lay down two runs of the Platon before putting the next sub-floor layer down, which I used OSB for. Considering how unlevel our concrete floor is, I should have used tongue and grove plywood to prevent the seams from being uneven. However, after hauling down some twenty 4×8 sheets of 1/2 OSB down our narrow basement stairs, I was using them regardless. Any unlevelness that occurs should be hidden with the carpet.

Here is the majority of the basement subfloor down:

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The spot on the right

Our house has been used more as a home recently than a place to swing a hammer and wield a crowbar. Maybe it is because we have decided to take it easy? Maybe to sit back and enjoy a cold one? I don’t know. It surely couldn’t be the 8lb baby in the bassinet that has made us rearrange our lives.

We welcomed Adley into the world mid-June. She was 7lb 9.9oz, 20.5in, and came with healthy vocal cords pre-installed. Casey has been doing her best to get Adley into tip-top (as in, “topping the scales”) since she was born. Brendan was a chunky-monkey when born, so we figured Adley may as well follow in his footsteps .

It is amazing how things change when you go from one child to two. You would think the work load would be about double, but I swear it is quadruple what it is with one child. Casey asked me the other night who I thought Adley looked more like. I realized then that I haven’t even had enough time alone with Adley to actually really look her over and figure out important things like that .

http://www.meetup.com/dwolla/34577

So if you are in the Des Moines area, or anywhere in the world and really want to meet me, stop by. No one likes free stuff, but we’ll be giving away ridiculously comfy t-shirts if you don’t want to meet me or hear about Dwolla.

You know you want to.

Good excuse to clean the server!

Now, back to our (ir)regular scheduled programming.

*Sorry for typos, format etc. I am writing this in the car!

Taking the stairs down.

Putting the stairs back up in the other direction!

Now that the stairs face the other way we have a list of “projects” that need to be done in order for the main stair project to be completed. The walls going upstairs need dry wall in spots as the plaster is missing, the floor needs to be extended out by Brendan’s bedroom door, the old “kitchen” walls need mudd after taking down the rest of the wallpaper (I HATE taking down wallpaper btw), then comes texture and paint on all the walls, the wood floor needs to be refinished,  and last but not least a new railing and two newel posts. Whew! Did I miss any thing? I’m sure I did. In fact, I can already remember a few other things. That just means I’ll have to write another post or two!

Out of that list I would say Shane has accomplished quite a bit. I spent a Saturday afternoon taking off the last of the wallpaper so Shane could get working on the walls. My mother-in-law gave me the trick of using the back of a light switch cover to scrape off the paper after you sprayed it with vinegar water. This worked so much better than an actual scraper or some other tool. (Thanks Lori!)

Take note of the ceiling behind me. We are ripping it out and redoing the entire ceiling with stained beadboard.

As of right now Shane has almost all the dry wall patched in on the walls and most of it has had the final sanding. The area by the windows needs the last coat of mudd and sanding. Once that is done we will have our neighbor come texture. He is the one who did Brendan’s room. Have I mentioned that he is absolutely awesome?! He is!

Looking down from the top of the stairs.

Shane also has the floor extended out by Brendan’s room. This was of course a top priority, along with creating a temporary railing.

Speaking of the railing, it really is a bummer that the original pieces are garbage. There is just really no way to keep what is already there. The height of the newel post and railing are very low and not acceptable with kids living here. Shane and I have been exploring our options. We checked out the local hardware stores (yuck), searched ebay, and have called a guy for estimates who works with the old wood. I am really hoping to go with this guy as I have heard great things and seen his work (beautiful)…not to mention we would get the old douglas fir. What it will come down to is cost. I am not willing to put out a fortune since we don’t want to live here forever.

Brendan wanted to be in the picture.

Along with staying busy on this project we have also been getting ready for  Baby N. The nursery will be in the second bedroom upstairs, across from Brendan’s. This is the only room that still has the cracks, missing texture spots, etc. I swear I was fine with just touching up the room with new paint, but I decided to try my hand at mudding! I managed to get one wall done in double to triple the time it takes for Shane to get one coat done. Not only that, but my layer was way too thick (I thought it looked good)! So this last weekend we decided to skip skim coating the entire wall. Instead we are going to have our neighbor texture this room when he does the other areas upstairs. The room of course won’t look as great as Brendan’s, but we figure it will at least match up with the rest of the house’s heavier texture. Now I have to add, that our texture isn’t really that heavy. The painter, Andy, who did it claimed it was the finest he could do, an orange peel. Well when we had the awesome neighbor do Brendan’s he said he could go finer than that. His turned out to be what we were after.

The white wall behind the crib is the one that we put mudd on.

It sounds like we have been working non-stop on our house, but the truth is we really haven’t! We tend to go in spurts; especially with the weather here in ND being gorgeous the last couple weeks. With that in mind, we started many projects outside, but I’ll do a separate post on those! We’ve also been able to visit family. Here is a picture of Brendan having fun in the lake at my in-laws.

Yes, it was that warm out to play in the lake!

Some other random house stuff I’ve accomplished is refinishing Brendan’s bedroom and closet doors. We cheated and had both dipped. I can’t even tell you how nice this was versus stripping them ourselves. All I can say is that I have no desire to ever strip any thing myself again! Along with getting his doors done I had to get the hardware cleaned up. Pretty easy task using the boiling method. This last weekend I also boiled the window hardware for Brendan’s room. It now sits on the windows waiting for Shane to install it.

Brendan's bedroom door.

Just because I have been putting less time into house projects doesn’t mean that I haven’t been getting anything done on that front. As Casey mentioned in her last post, we are working on flipping the stairs. In the early 1940′s, the owners of our house flipped the stairs around 180 degrees. This allowed them to put a second door in the porch and have an apartment upstairs. But, when the house isn’t used as two separate living areas, it requires you to walk through the main floor bedroom (the “master” bedroom at that) in order to get upstairs. On the plus side, it does encourage us to keep our bedroom mostly clean when company are over.

Getting the stairs flipped is a pretty decent sized project for us. We first ripped out a wall in the old apartment “kitchen” (which was about the size of modern walk-in-closets) and the plaster and lathe on the underside of the stairs in a closet that was added beneath them. This is where the stairs will now start. Then we pulled up the part of the floor that was added above the current stairs to make the room square. After that, I spent a week scraping the linoleum off of the douglas fir.

That is where we are currently. Since the amount of floor in there is pretty small, I ordered a belt sander to hopefully get the floor finished. I’ll need it anyways in a few spots that a large drum sander couldn’t get to anyways. Three weeks from now I have family coming up to do the actual flip.

Other than the stairs, Casey has been working on finishing some of the trim we’ve had on the backburner for months. And we also resealed some of the basement that has had water infiltration issues for a while (which was also likely due to clogged gutters).

We are thinking about moving out of our house and into the country in the next year or two. I grew up in the woods and I want Brendan to be able to enjoy it as much as I did. That is another reason for my disinterest in posting on here. We are at a point now where we aren’t going to start any projects that won’t increase the value significantly (flipping the stairs is likely to be a huge added value to buyers).

Once we figure out what exactly life has in store for us in this, I’ll be sure to do my best to post an update

Main Floor Before (now)

Main Floor After

Here are some more!

Before

After

Finally, here are the last two. These are of the upstairs.

Upstairs Before

Upstairs After

I should note that Shane did these around the time we bought the house, before all the flooding. So on the main floor where it says, “Office” is actually our bedroom.