I recently received an email from the folks over at Woodshop Bits about the opportunity to offer my readers a small giveaway. While it was tempting to keep it for myself, I decided it would be more fun to give something away.

So what am I giving away? A trip for 2 to Antigua? A night in NYC? A weekend on the beach? Boring. How about a couple router bits? So much better, right? Erm, maybe not, but it is all I have to offer!

Classical 2-Piece Router Bit set

If you think you could use these, post a comment to get entered. If you subscribe to S&C with a feed reader, post another comment telling me so and you’ll get another. While this isn’t the fanciest giveaway in the history of blogging, if you blog about the giveaway, I’ll give you another five entries. Just make sure to let me know.

Thanks to Woodshop Bits for providing the giveaway! Go buy something from them as a way to say thanks. I’m not getting paid or anything to do this, I just thought someone could use the bits more than I could!

Giveaway is over. Thanks for entering!

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 .

It feels like this week we have accomplished a lot. Some of the work we’ve done ourselves, but a lot of it we hired out (such as the foaming). In one of my last posts about Brendan’s room I mentioned the painter not showing up and how disappointed I was. I’ve since decided that every thing happens for a reason.

Shane and I have been getting to know our neighbors and I have to say it’s great! I’ve always wanted to be the friendly/neighborly type.  On to my main point. The gentleman across the street, Ron, is a painter! After talking with him about the projects we have going on he offered to come take a look at Brendan’s room. Well every thing worked out and he started Brendan’s room today!

Before

We had lots of plaster cracks and Ron really knew what he was doing. We know from talking with him and looking at his work that he has the experience. I am very excited in case you can’t tell! They are done for the day, but will be back tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday.

After

.

I know I posted the blue color I was going to paint in Brendan’s room, but here is a picture of the two colors I decided to go with. The blue is going on all of the walls except the window wall. The tan is going on the window wall and up and on the ceiling. Do you think the brown color is too dark? This room gets a ton of natural light, but I am still struggling with if I should go a step lighter.

After the walls are finished in Brendan’s room we only have the floor left. I don’t think I posted on this, so if I have I apologize. Shane and I ended up going the carpet route. We tried many different ways to uncover the wood floor and in the end the wood floor was pretty much shot. Our options then went to ripping out the floor and putting in a new, old wood floor or carpet. Carpet was cheaper and required less work. Shane, Brendan, and I headed to Lowes to pick out carpet and we got lucky! The carpet I had picked out a while back was on sale and had two different promos going on.

The installers were here yesterday to take measurements and now they are waiting on us to decide what color we are going with. All in all it has been a very exciting week! I see an end in sight for Brendan’s room. Then it’s on to our room….but not for a while! Here is a random picture to end the post on. We have been making an effort to have more family time and do some fun activities. Last Friday we took Brendan to the races. He LOVES the races.

Things have been busy around here this summer. If you follow this blog at all, you’ve likely noticed due to the almost non-existent posting. It is just hard to put together a blog post when you’ve either got sunny, 80* weather outside, or a project here or there calling your name.

Another one of the reasons I have been so busy is I’m making a pretty big (and positive) change in my life. I’m stuck keeping it quiet for a bit longer as some key people are not aware of the change and they probably wouldn’t be pleased to find out via this blog. I’ll spill the beans in the next week or two.

But onto the work we’ve been doing recently. The basement bedroom/office is slowly coming together. All of the exterior walls are framed and wired up. Yesterday, the last key component was completed. Foam insulation:

This was done by the same company (Cullen Insulation) that did the basement bathroom. I absolutely love this stuff. My wallet, not so much. But it is the only feasible way to seal up the concrete and it quickly adds R7 per inch. I’ll be adding R11 fiberglass insulation over the top of this (my wallet really wouldn’t like 3 1/2 inches consider how it disliked the 1 inch). Ideally this would result in R18, but since the foam took up a bit of the room in the stud cavity, the fiberglass will get compressed a little bit and will likely lose a bit of its insulation capabilities. It’ll be more than enough for a basement though!

We also stopped by Menards last night to pick up some materials needed to continue on. We picked up some plastic for a vapor barrier and the necessary staple gun. We also grabbed another 250ft of 12/2 wiring. It is amazing how fast you can run through 250ft of wire! I also picked up more 2×4′s to frame in the area around the furnace. Did you know you can fit 20 7ft 2×4′s in a 4 door Grand Am, as well as a two year old and a wife (with the trunk closed)? It takes impressive skill, though .

It is amazing how warm weather seems to make the to-do list grow exponentially. I don’t even want to know how long it has been since I have written a post last. If I could find some great excuse as to why I haven’t posted an update recently, it would have been placed here. Maybe something like: “I thought of writing a post on my trip into outer space to save planet Earth from an incoming meteor, but time was of the essence.” Instead, all I can say is I’ve been busy, and the longer it was between posts, the more guilty I felt about not posting, which seemed to make posting even more difficult.

But anyways… the post, Shane. Focus. The most up to date, update, I can give you is on our fence. I came home for lunch today to find a friend of the neighbors out pressure washing their side of our fence. The aforementioned fence isn’t anything award winning, to say the least. It is a previous owner’s DIY job. Basic 1×10′s run horizontal, attached to 4×4′s every 8 or so feet.

It used to be your standard ~6ft tall, but at some point it seems one of the previous owners and the neighbor got along so great they chopped it down to 3-4ft and added a gate between the two yards. When we first bought the place, we were planning on raising it back up. Potentially replacing it altogether in the process. But we’ve gotten to the point now where we rather enjoy mingling with the neighbors over the fence. And they have a couple black lab puppies that are fun to play with:

Abby

Bella

Back to the neighbor’s friend pressure washing the fence… after finishing my lunch, we went out and asked them what they were up to. Their side of the fence is in pretty rough shape. Some of it has never seen paint, and the rest appears to have just been primed. They were finally going to paint it. After looking at it for a bit, we mutually agreed that it needs a bit more work than that. We pointed a couple dozen boards that needed to be replaced. Some were sistered where parts must have rotted out. While replacing them would probably have been easier and not that expensive, I can appreciate the macgyver spirit. Others were badly warped, and others rotting. They seemed on board (hah, no pun was intended, but it works!) with the suggestions, but they might be cursing me now that I’m back at work.

Neighbor's Side

In June we adopted a Siamese cat from the Humane Society. Brendan loves cats! We named him Toby and he was Brendan’s best buddy. After a while we noticed Brendan’s eczema was getting worse than normal. We ended up having him tested for allergies and sadly, he was positive for cats. Toby was adopted out to a great couple last month. Brendan has done a great job adjusting.

Last week Shane and I started looking at dogs. We knew we didn’t want a puppy, but rather an adult. We went back and forth a lot on breeds, but in the end it was mutually decided we wanted a Doberman. Shane managed to find a breeder 30 minutes from his parent’s cabin. Like I said, we weren’t interested in puppies, but the adults they were getting rid of. I was all set to go and check them out, however, they come at a high price. A price tag of $2,000+ to be exact. OUCH!

So we headed back to our humane society and spent some time with a terrier mix and two boxers. The boxers had a sad story. The female boxer you could see had puppies, but there was no puppies there. The pair was found wandering and it was thought they had been bred together and then dropped off once the puppies were old enough to make it. The lady also said that the mating pair were longing for each other. They were of course separated and put in two different kennels.

On Saturday Shane mentioned going to the humane society and taking the dogs out for a walk. We got there and the boxers were being quarantined and treated for something (can’t remember the name). I headed to the small/medium dog room and that is when I saw him! A 1 yr old, male, Miniature Pinscher. We took him out and he was perfect! An hour later and we were taking him home.

Today is day three of having our min. pin. He really has the greatest personality. He loves to play, be outside, snuggle, and best of all…he is great with Brendan.  He is also very social. He greets new people nicely and likes other animals. He is getting along great with our neighbor’s dog.

I am really bad at coming up with names. When we named our two Siamese cats, George and Toby, we just knew the names fit! So far I haven’t found our little doggy a name. We tend to like actual “human” names. I’m asking for every ones help for name suggestions. We’ll let you know what we end up naming him! Thanks!

As of late I have no motivation to do any thing! My to do list is a mile long, but I can’t seem to start working again. Maybe the reason for this is, because I managed to meet my self created deadline for Brendan’s woodwork. I have every thing except the door frames and bottom board of the window done! I just finished picking out the paint in the door frames today and my plan is to have them sanded and stained tomorrow. In all honesty I could have the last board on the window done as well. However, I’m getting lazier with picking out paint and I want make sure I do a good job. I’m hoping that I can convince Shane, who has the patience I don’t, to work on it this weekend if he can find time.

The next step in redoing Brendan’s room is having the walls skim coated, some spots fixed, textured, and painted. The reason I boogied on the woodwork was so the painter could come and do all of this. He was suppose to be here 3 weeks ago. I tried to get a hold of him a couple days ago, but so far I have yet to hear back. I think quite highly of our painter so to say that I’m disappointed is an understatement.

There use to be a small door here to get to the "attic" space. Shane took it out and patched it up.

Thanks to every one who voted and commented on our carpet vs. wood floor poll. We ended up deciding to go with the wood floor. We had a few different tips from other house bloggers who have dealt with linoleum and the tar. I tried them all. The one technique that came the closest to working was putting a towel down and soaking it in boiling water. I do believe it would have worked, except for the fact that our floor is a soft wood, douglas fir. The wood ended up gouging pretty bad. Shane has since tried using a floor blade we bought at Lowes. So far it seems this will work. We are waiting to officially start the floor until I get every thing out of Brendan’s room.

On a different note some other small things we have done with the house is touching up paint in the kitchen and bathroom. I figured I was quite capable of doing this! We also had the house sprayed for bugs inside and outside. Yay for this! I was pretty excited as it only cost us $75 and it is guaranteed for 2 months. I HATE bugs.  Shane has been working on Brendan’s windows, but I’ll let him blog about that. Um, what else?! With the nice weather the last couple of days I’ve been outside working on landscaping. I took out a tree yesterday! Now I need to figure out what to do with it!