For Christmas this year my husband and I received a Dremel Multi-Max from my in-laws. At the time I figured it was more of a gift geared towards Shane. Shortly after taking it of the box  and using the tool I found I was wrong! I have gotten so much use out of this particular tool. In fact, it motivated me to get my butt moving on the wood work upstairs. If you recall this was a project I started over a year ago. (Yikes!)

I worked for two days and I got the baseboards, doorways, bathroom door, newel post, and top of the railing done. By done I mean sanded, stained, and one coat of poly applied. Here is a picture of the newel post, some floor boards, and Brendan’s door frame. The Dremel made sanding so much easier, especially in the hard to reach spots (like the sides of the door frames). Brendan even liked it. He kept grabbing it and telling me to turn it on!

All in all I am very happy with how every thing turned out. Of course I am technically not done as I still need to do the other two coats of poly. However, in my mind I’m done (sorry honey)! The only negative is that the railing and newel post will soon come out. Shane asked me why I bothered with it. I guess I wanted to have the satisfaction that I got it done. It has also been nice to walk up and see the newel post looking nice. I’m not sure what we will do it these pieces once they come out (which is very very soon). I hate to toss it, so maybe sell? Not sure.

The reason they have to come out is, because we have started flipping the steps. This is a major project that has to be done. I don’t recall if we have ever explained the steps, but a previous owner flipped them to make an apartment upstairs. If we ever hope to sell this house this is something that has to be done. The original plan was to start this project this Summer. With me being pregnant and due in June I pushed the project to now! Who wants to be in the icky mess with a 2 1/2 year old and newborn and be stuck living on the main floor in our full size bed?!

Here is a teaser picture of the stair flipping. Shane or I will write another post about this project soon.

This is so not house related, but I couldn’t resist putting these up. Mr B. (aka Brendan) is finally starting to smile for the camera, so we have been having fun taking pictures. The last picture shows you how desperate my son is for a desk! He somehow managed to squeeze in this doll size one and play!

Flash was a bit close, but oh well!

Shane and I haven’t really done any thing on the house lately. At least nothing on our House Projects list. Yes, we have a list. Shane made it for me and it is pretty detailed. He has every room on it and every little project goes step by step! The list is great and very helpful, but Shane really made it to point out how many projects I have started and need to finish!

One of the projects I have wanted to finish is the wood work I started upstairs. I really thought I would have it ready for stain this weekend, but I have yet to even plug in the sander! In my defense, I will tell you I managed to bring the sander and the sand paper from the basement upstairs! I truly planned on starting the wood work, but decided to wait when I realized I had no extension cord up there to plug in the sander!

I decided tonight while on the way to Menards that tomorrow I will accomplish some wood work, but I am being realistic! Instead of making my goal the entire upstairs I will work on a few pieces on the main floor. In our dining room we have two small trim pieces that need to have the paint picked out,  be fine sanded, stained, and then poly. These pieces are not done, because the originals were thrown out by the demo guys. There is also the bottom piece of the window in the kitchen that is new and just needs stain and poly. This piece was also thrown out. When the work first began on our house almost a year ago we stressed to every one who came in that the wood work needed to be kept. Sadly, not everyone cared and/or listened.

Other than that, there really isn’t a whole lot I plan on doing. Of course there is always cleaning, but I won’t bore anyone with that! As for fun stuff, this weekend Shane and I are taking Brendan sledding. Brendan LOVES the snow. I swear he would stay outside all day and play if we let him!

As for some small stuff we have completed in the last couple of weeks, it really has been piddly! I unpacked some more of our boxes last week. The majority of it was pictures and knick-knacks. Pretty sad that we have lived here for eleven months and have yet to unpack every thing! There is still an attic space full of boxes, but a  lot of it is baby items and scrap booking stuff. (Wow, I love the word “stuff” tonight!) Since we unpacked, we managed to put up some pictures upstairs. Until now, it has been bare and really hasn’t felt “homey” up there. Now it definitely does and it even helps distract you from the unfinished wood work!

The last thing accomplished was hanging up vintage, glass towel bars. I purchased these from the antique store in town almost a month ago and they have been patiently waiting! Shane surprised me two nights ago by getting out the drill and screws. I am still unsure of how I really feel about the glass bars. I loved them when I first saw them, thus why I purchased them! But I kind of liked them better not on the wall! Pathetic, I know!

Well, that is all for now. I hope every one has a great weekend whether it is relaxing or staying busy working on your home!

Brendan’s room is finally done (almost)! Our neighbor Ron did an amazing job of redoing the walls and the paint colors turned out great. I will admit that I painted the ceiling the same color as the window wall and it was way too dark. So I ended up having to reprime and repaint. I opted to go with the lightest color from the same color swatch that I used. I’m loving it! Here is a picture pre-carpet.

The carpet install went pretty smoothly. It didn’t take Lowes very long and they were pretty nice. Brendan is definitely all boy and loves to play rough. We did go with the thickest option for this reason. So far I am very happy with the results.

Sorry about the picture being sideways. I am not too computer savy with how to fix this. Trust me I tried! So I will have to have Shane do it later!

My only complaint about the carpet install was that it scratched up our wood work. After all the hard work I put into refinishing it I was and am still bummed. Lowes did come take a look as a small piece was also chipped, but did state it was unavoidable. So now we have to sand all of the woodwork and repoly. YAY! Not. So this is on our to do list. It will probably stay there for a while as I am burnt out on working.

Besides fixing the woodwork, we also need to finish some areas of the window frame, strip the closet and bedroom doors, and touch up some paint. With the doors we are hoping to have them dipped and avoid the headache, but we will see! All in all I am very happy how Brendan’s room turned out. Shane and I discussed it last night and his room is by far the best room in the house. I do think it was all worth it as Brendan looks at his room every morning and says, “Nice room.” Sometimes he replaces nice with the word cool! Last night as Shane was installing his windows Brendan was telling his Daddy thanks for those. It definitely makes it easier to put all the work into it when your two year old sure seems to appreciate it!

Since I made the post on 10/25/09 about our big changes, things have been insanely busy. How long ago was it that I last blogged about Brendan’s windows? Over a month… ouch.

While I’ve waited for the glazing to harden on the last window, I did replace the storm windows in his room. While I like the new aluminum storm windows better than the old aluminum storm windows, I’m not proud of the fact that I gave Menards the wrong measurements and the storms had to be mounted to the exterior rather than up against the normal storm window stops. It doesn’t look bad, but I don’t like to make stupid mistakes like that. And because they were custom sized, they couldn’t be returned, which is why I installed them on the outside trim.

It took me a few days of 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there to prime and paint the window frame that is exposed to the elements. Once I finished that and let it dry, it was time to get the windows in place! We have to create new window stops as the ones that were there consisted of about 3 pieces for each part that should have been a single piece. Lots of seams. So for now, we have windows that more sitting in place than secured in place.

We have two pulls for these windows, but it seems we “misplaced” the screws for them. So for now, you get a shot with my arm in place.

These windows also did not have sash locks. I’m guessing that as the wood rotted, they pulled loose and were thrown. We are going to have to buy a bunch anyways for the rest of the windows in the house. For these windows, I’m pretty certain that I’ll have to dump some wood hardener into the screw holes on the upper sash as that board had quite a bit of moisture damage (it actually sags about 1/8-1/4″ of an inch in the middle, used to be much worse). Speaking of that, any suggestions on how to deal with sash locks that don’t line up equally? Should I buy a jig saw and cut an 1/8″ thick board to match the foot print of the sash lock for the upper sash to get it to the proper height?

Also, on a different note, thank you Todd at Home Construction Improvement for your suggestion on my Office Progress post regarding using a 12″ blade to fix the visible drywall seams. I ended up using a 10″ blade as that was the largest I had, but it worked wonders compared to the 8″ I was using initially.

After using random.org to generate a random number for the number of entries, it dumped out a 7. I almost chose the wrong winner as Ethan racked up a hidden 5 entries by mentioning the giveaway on One Project Closer. So after triple checking it, the winner was indeed Ethan.

Ethan, please click on Contact on the upper left and send me an email with your mailing address.

Thanks to everyone who entered! And thanks to Woodshop Bits for supplying the giveaway!

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.