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 .

Thanks to every one who posted a name for our new dog! We did the same thing on facebook and a friend on there came up with Joey. We decided to go with this name, because Brendan can easily say it and he says it so cute!

We took Joey to the vet the first week we had him. After getting checked over the vet concluded Joey is 3 years old. However, because we will never really know, the vet decided to go with at least 2 years. The vet also gave Joey a clean bill of health.

Shane was a little worried that Joey wouldn’t be easy to train. Our neighbor, who is quite taken with Joey, also made the statement that Joey would be difficult, if not impossible, to train (upon learning that we adopted him from the humane society). I have to be honest, I was a little offended! Joey has shown both of them though that he is very intelligent. Shane was able to teach him how to sit in one night. I was pretty impressed. Now they are working on down (not off).

I’ll try to remember to post some pictures of Joey and Brendan soon. Good night!

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!

This last week I’ve been focused on getting Brendan’s room finished and ready for the painter. So in light of that I took a look at his closet. The closet ceiling had been sheet rocked at some point in the past, right over the plaster. The job looked horrible and you could tell it was done by an amateur. I knew the dry wall had been put up to cover something; why else would it be up there?! But never the less, I decided it needed to come down and be redone so it looked decent.

Once the first few pieces of dry wall was off I discovered the plaster was in bad condition. As I continued to take off the remaining dry wall the plaster caved in, er fell off, exposing the lathe.

It was at this point you could see there had been a leak and the previous owners cut a hole in the lathe, fixed the leak, and put in insulation. Oops, wait a second. How did  know there had been a leak?! I figured that out, because the lathe to the left of the hole was completely rotted and covered in the “m” word. What’s the “m” word?! Yup, you guess it, MOLD! My little project of taking down the dry wall turned into a big project that took us two days to complete. Two days doesn’t sound so bad but when you look at how many hours we put in you realize it was in fact a big, long project.

Since this was my project it was up to me to rip out all of the lath, deal with the nasty insulation that rains down, and of course clean it all up. As of day two I was so frustrated and crabby I decided to take it out by hitting the remaining plaster with my pry bar as hard as I could. All that did was knock off a few little chunks and put insulation down my shirt. At that point I had it. I went to Shane and whined. I wanted him to finish ripping it out and I would clean the mess. My whining worked and he finished the demo stage, as well as doctoring up a rotted out joist.

Once the closet was all cleaned out, Shane put up new insulation. I have to admit that while this was an unexpected project I’m glad we did it. I’m sure I seem crazy since this was a closet and I could have just tried to make the existing dry wall work, but there is a reason for my madness. While it may just be a closet, the right side of the closet is used as a small play room for Brendan. There are shelves full of his books and toys all over the floor. Brendan loves to go in there, shut the door, and play. I’m sure to small child it seems like a fort. Now with this in mind, Shane came up with an idea that we might as well change out the closet lighting  and get it up to code since we’re down to the rafters/joists. It currently has a single incandescent, exposed bulb literally an inch away from the angled ceiling. In our closet the electricians had to put in a florescent pull light to replace the existing one to get it up to code since they worked on wiring in there.

While I like the original lights it does scare me because it gets super hot and its butted up to the ceiling. Shane came up with putting in a light on either side of the door and instead of a pull chain, wiring in a light switch. I love this idea, because the light switch will be low enough for Brendan to control, yet high enough so it doesn’t seem off if we ever do sell this house. Now that I have written a small book  it’s time to get ready for church. Happy Sunday every one!